Repercussions
by Dogstar-Black
Summary: For his entire adult life, Clint has been a part of SHIELD and it has been the closest thing he's had to a home. Then, he joined the Avengers, and they wormed their way into his family faster than he would have thought possible. So how could they expect him to choose between the agency that took him in, and a man that has become his brother? Part of my ProtectiveReasoning universe.
1. Chapter 1

**Hello everyone, and welcome to Repercussions, the sequel to Ties That Bind within my Protective Reasoning universe. If you missed it, my AN above the new chapter of Retrograde last week explained a whole slew of things, including why Glass no longer exists. Go check that out if you're interested. If you're new to my work, welcome! This story is fourth in my Protective Reasoning universe. It can be read alone, but some parts will reference back to the other stories.**

**Now, this story is already completely written, and I will be updating once a week to give me time to finish writing the next story so it's ready by the time this is done being posted. Maybe if I'm feeling generous I'll put out a chapter or two within the same week, but for the most part, I'm going to stick to Mondays.**

**The first three/four chapters will focus more on Clint's relationship with SHIELD, for reasons you'll see once we get further along. Then again, you can probably guess by the summary.**

**All that taken care of, I'll leave you to enjoy. If you have any other questions feel free to leave a review or PM me. And if you have the time to spare, reviews in general are awesome and I do try to respond to most of them. So, thank you for reading, and enjoy.**

* * *

Clint grumbled quietly to himself as he held his hand to the scanner outside one of SHIELD's training gyms before punching in the correct access code and watching the door in front of him open. He should have known when Fury didn't come down on him with some bullshit mission within a month after the whole Menendez issue that the director was planning something much worse. And sure enough, just under a week ago, Fury had kindly informed him that he would get to spend a week training SHIELD recruits.

It wasn't that he didn't like the training aspect of this assignment. It was that, more often than not, SHIELD recruits had egos the size of Texas and they were being forced into the same room to do things that they were _absolutely sure_ they could already do better than anyone else. What made matters even worse, was that this was this particular class of recruits' last week of training before graduating to the status of a full SHIELD agent.

Clint just knew that before the first day was over he was going to want to strangle at least one of them.

He knew he had been the same way, probably even worse, as a recruit himself, and that _his_ trainers and Phil had dealt with him without killing him, but he had never claimed to be patient outside the scope of a mission. He had also never claimed to be qualified to train recruits in the first place. He was a field agent; an assassin. But this wasn't the first time Fury had pushed him into the role, and he doubted it would be the last.

The only saving grace in this situation was the fact that he was training them in the skills of agility and marksmanship. At least Fury hadn't been completely heartless and stuck him with something like SHIELD protocol.

Another only slightly better than miserable aspect was that recruits were never trained on the helicarrier itself, and thus he was on the New York base instead. At least here not _every_ agent stared at him like he was about to snap and kill them all. In fact, he was even friends with a few, from his days living on this base during his earlier years at SHIELD.

Shaking himself out of his thoughts, Clint checked his watch and noted that the recruits were due to meet him in ten minutes before he looked around the gym at the obstacle course that occupied it. It was simple enough, by his standards, consisting of a 25 yard tire run, 10 foot balance beam, net climb, a field of six-inch wide, four inch tall foot poles, stretch of quickly swinging punching bags that had come on with the lights, and a long length of glorified monkey bars.

The _fun_ obstacle courses came during specialized training depending on the class of an agent. These recruits were just going through general training, and thus, had the easy course. That being said, agility was normally ranked 2nd in the list of worst training sections, only beat out by SHIELD protocol. Clint, on the other hand, thought it was enormous amounts of fun _and_ held the course record. Which was why Fury usually chose him to train it, along with marksmanship. The only other section he'd ever trained was hand-to-hand combat.

He looked up sharply when the door to the gym opened, a quietly murmuring group of ten recruits filing inside the gym. Quickly realizing their instructor was waiting, they lined up attentively, eyes watching Clint as he walked over to them curiously.

"Morning." he greeted easily, surveying them. At least now he was at the point where the recruits were at least a year or two younger than him. It had been awkward the first time Fury and Coulson had pushed him into training, and every single one of the recruits had been _older_ than him. "Welcome to your last week of general training. I wish I could tell you it was going to be easy."

He gave an almost predatory smirk with those words, just wanting to mess with them, and garnered a few nervous-sounding chuckles from the line.

"I'm Agent Barton, you can call me Hawkeye. This week, we're going to be meeting here for three hours in the morning for agility, and three hours after lunch in the shooting range for marksmanship. I will be your trainer for both sections, and at the end of the week, providing I don't kill you, you'll graduate to full agent status. Any questions so far?"

One male recruit of average height and lithe build on the end of the line raised a hand hesitantly, eyes slightly widened, and Clint rolled his eyes and spoke without having to hear his question.

"No, I'm not actually going to kill you. I do have a sense of humor, as outlandish as that may seem. Anything else?"

"Sir," a taller, broad-shouldered man of about 23 spoke up from near the middle of the group, and Clint nodded for him to continue. "We've, ah, heard a lot about you."

Clint felt his shoulders stiffen slightly, but he kept his face outwardly blank. He'd been expecting this after all, and it certainly shouldn't surprise him. Not after how the general SHIELD population had reacted to the whole fiasco with Loki.

"Care to tell me what you've heard, Recruit…" he trailed off for the man's name, not able to see the back of his shirt at the moment.

"Jones. We've been told you're one of the best agents SHIELD has, sir. And that we're under no circumstances to piss you off." the man said with a slight smirk before faltering slightly as if deciding whether or not he wanted to continue. "Agent Tena was also under the impression that you were a traitor sir."

Clint gave an impressed blink, hiding his resignation at Tena's continued hatred of him, as the rest of the recruits stared at Jones like he'd lost every marble he'd ever had. He could understand their shock, seeing as it had the same cause as his impressed expression. It was extremely gutsy to inform him so lightly that another agent considered him a traitor.

After no less than a heartbeat, Clint raised a single eyebrow and responded, meeting Jones' gaze.

"Well, recruit, do you think that Director Fury would have forced me into training the lot of you if he thought I was a traitor?" he asked rhetorically, and the other man actually gave a smirk.

"I wouldn't guess so, sir."

"Alright then." Clint moved on pointedly, looking down the line of recruits again. "Let's get started. Agility is something mostly picked up through practice, so a majority of our time is going to be spent looking at specific aspects of this course and running through them until you train your bodies to be able to react quick enough to avoid falling on your face." he watched with an almost amused expression as a few of the recruits eyes turned toward the swinging punching bags. "But, my offer to all of you for the entire week is that if you can run that entire course in five minutes, you can sit back and drink lemonade in the mornings while the rest of the class trains."

It was no less than he expected to suddenly gain every single recruit's much more focused attention. The prospect of getting out of a three-hour morning training session was far too much temptation to ignore.

"Sir," one of the three female recruits in the class spoke up, sounding confused, and Clint turned to her. "SHIELD average for the course is _seven_ minutes. Agent Brighton told us we weren't expected to run it any faster than that when we started out training."

"You're not." Clint agreed far easier than any of the recruits expected. "And I'm not going to mark down on your evaluations if you don't. But the last thing you should shoot for is to be average."

"Can _you_ even run that course in five minutes?" another of the recruits challenged cockily, and Clint gave a wolfish smirk. Easiest way to prove to the recruits that he was serious? Prove it to them.

"Why don't you tell me?" he retorted, before starting the stopwatch that had been in his pocket before tossing it to the recruit and taking off at a dead sprint for the tire run that signified the start of the course.

Instead of simply running through the tires, he used his momentum to flip across them three at a time, alternating as to whether hands or feet landed in the center of the tires. It took him six flips to clear them, landing smoothly on his feet and taking off again, this time across the balance beam. His footing and speed didn't so much as waver, and within moments he was making his way to the net climb.

He gave a smirk as he neared it, and then veered suddenly to the left. He managed three steps straight up the gym wall before his momentum gave out and he launched himself up and off, hands landing firmly on the beam at the top of the net. Vaulting over it with ease, he landed in a graceful crouch, perched precariously on a single foot pole.

He took off across them nearly instantly with quick confident strides, again not giving so much as a second thought to his footing. Reaching the last one, he looked ahead to gauge the movements of the swinging punching bags and hesitated for maybe a fraction of a second before ducking into a roll to slip around the first bag. Leaping to his feet smoothly, he twisted and spun around the following bags, sometimes leaving no more than an inch of space between him and them. Spinning expertly around the last bag, he took off towards the monkey bars, leaping up and practically flying across them two or more at a time. Coming to the last one, he made a show of swinging back to gather momentum before launching himself forward and off the bar, flipping neatly.

When he landed, it was mere feet from where he'd started, near the other end of the line of recruits. Fluidly he stood, raising an eyebrow to the open-mouthed stares he was receiving.

"Well, recruit, what was my time?" he asked lightly, looking to the man that had challenged him, who held the stop watch up weakly while staring at him, clearly embarrassed.

"3:28, sir." he more or less mumbled, offering the stop watch out, which Clint took back easily.

"I wouldn't ask you to do something I couldn't." Clint said wisely, moving to stand more in the middle of the line of recruits. "And I definitely don't expect you all to be able to do something like that. Not yet anyway. Which is why I say that five minutes is good enough to get you out of morning training. I'm not to lie; I'm a field agent. I want to train you to be ready for real-life scenarios, not what someone can cook up in a training gym." he gazed around at all of them individually before clapping his hands together. "So let's get started, shall we? I'm going to get a preliminary run from all of you to see where the class needs the most work. Recruit Jones has kindly volunteered to go first."

Clint smirked as he cast a glance to the recruit, who looked vaguely peeved for a moment, before shrugging it off and stepping forward graciously, waiting for Clint's nod to start.

The archer gave it to him only a few moments later, sharp eyes following Jones' progress through the course, noting every misstep or fraction of a stumble for future reference. The man came up with a modest time of 7:56, dropping off the monkey bars as soon as he reached the end, breathing heavily.

Clint called all the recruits forward and onto the course individually, learning their names as he went. It was no less than he expected to see that the recruits' main problems lie in the punching bags and the foot poles, and after taking a short water break once the entire class had run the course, he waved them over to the length of foot poles for some more focused training.

Balance in itself seemed to be a good place to start.

Barely giving the action any thought, Clint hopped up onto one of the poles, both feet carefully sharing the small space. He then lowered himself into a crouch, looking back up to the openly curious recruits.

"How many of you think you could manage this right here?" he asked, glancing down pointedly to his position. As expected, almost every single one of the recruits raised their hands. He smirked, and gave a slight shrug before motioning them to the other poles around him. "Try it then." he challenged.

He wasn't expecting anything horrendous. SHIELD only took the best after all, and these recruits had already been through weeks of other training. He still took it as a sign that it was going to be a long week when some of them were wobbling in a standing position alone, while others couldn't even get both feet onto the pole steadily.

* * *

Clint followed the class into the locker room at exactly 11, leaving them just enough time to get showered before lunch started.

As was typical when he was on base without Natasha, Clint grabbed his meal, found a secluded corner of the mess hall and sat alone. The only difference was that now, even two months shy of a year after the Loki deal, he couldn't bring himself to put his back to any of them. True, this wasn't the helicarrier, and this base held a far different agent pool which included many that he had known for years. But call him paranoid, he wasn't going to risk it.

He ate quickly, leaving the mess hall as soon as he had finished and then making his way towards the range. He'd been allotted a smaller one off the main training gym for this group of recruits, and thankfully it was already empty. He didn't want to go through all the trouble of intimidating anyone out.

He set up a line of ten targets at a relatively close range before laying out an accompanying number of pellet pistols. He wasn't giving anyone anything with actual bullets in it on the first day. The SHIELD techs had come up with ones remarkably similar to an actual gun to use for training, so he might as well use them. By the time he was set up, he still had more than half an hour before the recruits were due to join him, so on a whim he ventured into the weapons' room.

He came back into the range with a triumphant smirk, a bow, and a small quiver of arrows only moments later.

They had been his a long time ago, left behind upon his move up to the helicarrier as a permanent base as opposed to this one. It had been Phil's idea to change home base, something about the helicarrier being more internationally accessible. In retrospect, he could understand that. But he _had_ put up a bit of a fight initially. The New York base had been the closest thing he'd had to a stable, unmoving home in years.

Still lost in his thoughts, Clint jerked the bow open and pulled an arrow, notching it and pulling it back experimentally. The bow didn't offer any resistance, despite its lack of use, and within only moments and a handful of arrows he'd gotten the feel for it again and had taken to the rafters to give him some distance. He wove through and across the thin strips of metal gracefully, arrows beginning to pepper the bull's-eyes of the targets as time passed.

He only stopped, freezing in mid-shot, when the door to the gym opened. He blinked quickly as he realized that more time had passed than he had thought, before he let the tension out of his bowstring and crouched, perching himself on the rafter and watching the recruits curiously.

Once again, they had arrived en masse and he was curious to see what they would do with the situation presented to them. They would see the arrows, know they had to be his, but the question would be whether or not they would think to look up. He sincerely hoped that they did, seeing as this _was_ their last week of training.

"Great, first marksmanship training of the week and our trainer's already late." one of the men said sourly, a recruit named Maxwell. Some of the other recruits looked similarly concerned, but a slim, blonde woman named Clark simply nodded to the targets.

"He's been here." she pointed out matter of factly, and the others' gazes followed hers. "The range is set up, and I don't know of any other SHIELD agents that would use a bow and arrow."

"Well he's not here now." Maxwell snapped in retort, and another of the recruits shot a disapproving glance at him.

"Get your attitude in check, Maxwell." Walker said shortly, earning the gazes of a majority of his classmates. "Hawkeye isn't going to take it, and I'm not running sprints or anything else because of your mouth. So keep your smartass opinions to yourself."

Maxwell scowled in response but didn't offer another retort. The silence was instead broken by Recruit Flynn, who was still ogling at the targets lining the room.

"The guy physically ran out of room on the bullseye." the recruit shook his head in wonder, and Clint considered him carefully. He gave a silent sigh when the recruit looked around the gym, but not to the ceiling. "He's probably letting us stew to see what we would do."

It was then Clint decided he'd seen enough.

He pulled the arrow he'd left notched on the bowstring in his lap back to the corner of his mouth, sighting his target. The arrow flew near silently, slicing its path through the empty air through the heart of the grouping of recruits, passing within inches of some.

Their reactions were instantaneous; getting themselves out of the supposed danger zone and looking around for the threat. He physically saw some of them pale when they realized it was an arrow that had so narrowly missed them. He dropped from the rafters into the now silent range, landing in a crouch before stalking over to retrieve his arrow from the wall.

"Let's pretend for just a moment, that I had actually meant for this arrow to kill any of you." the archer said, voice outwardly calm and cool, though he allowed a hint of anger to slip through. "How many of you wouldn't have even seen it coming?"

Slowly, without so much as making a sound, the recruits lined up in front of him again, their expressions ranging from blank, to ashamed, to nearly terrified. As the silence stretched, Clint snorted and moved around them, instead making his way over to the targets to retrieve his arrows there.

"I think I asked you a question, recruits." he said next, tone lowering with intensity.

"None of us would have seen it, sir." it was Flynn that spoke up for the group, tone short and emotionless.

"And why not?" Clint continued, stalking back around to face them, eyes narrowed as he scanned down the completely still and silent line.

"We weren't expecting you to be in the rafters, sir." Flynn was once again the only one to respond to him, and Clint snorted.

"It's nice to know that this is a class of one." he said scathingly, collapsing his bow and setting it and his quiver aside before crossing his arms over his chest. "So are you telling me that in the field you're only going to be looking for people where you'd expect them to be?"

"No, sir." Jones spoke up carefully, and Clint snorted.

"So why the hell do it here?" he demanded. "I have half a mind to cancel training and send you all back to your bunks because I am not wasting my time training a bunch who is probably going to end up dead in a week anyway simply because of a lack of basic observational skills."

That earned flinches from a majority of them, but Clint wasn't exactly at a point where he cared whether or not he hurt their feelings. If training this group had to be his responsibility, he wasn't letting them go anywhere near any form of mission or assignment when they couldn't even handle spotting him in a calm, danger-free environment.

"It won't happen again, sir." Walker spoke up calmly, and Clint snorted.

"You're right, it won't. Because if it does, this entire class is going to have loads of fun joining me with drills at 4:30 every morning for the rest of this week, am I clear?" the archer scanned the line of recruits sharply with his statement.

"Yes, sir." this time it was Jones that responded for the class, and Clint gave a short nod before walking over to the table where he'd set out the pellet pistols.

"After that little show, it goes against my better judgment to put any form of weapon in any of your hands." he said coolly, waving them forward even as he spoke. "Despite that, grab a pistol and set up across from a target. We're going to start with the basics. Like how to properly hold a gun and not shoot yourself. Because I'm starting to think it's something that some of you would be able to manage."

Miraculously, it turned into a fairly good training session, seeing how disastrous it had started out.

Clint explained a proper shooting stance before letting them have at the targets to see where they stood. Three hours, dozens of pellets, and considerable instruction later, a majority of them were at the point where they could hit within the realm of the bullseye on a close-range target. Really the only one that was still having problems was Recruit Robins. Giving a sigh, Clint looked around before giving a sharp whistle to draw the recruit's attention to him.

"Alright, we're done for the day. I'll see you all at 8 o'clock sharp tomorrow morning." he announced, and the recruits set their pistols on the table they'd gotten them from before moving to leave the range.

"Seems like I have perfect timing." Clint glanced up and turned when he heard Fury's voice, raising an eyebrow as the director stepped around the shocked recruits to blow into the room.

"Director Fury, I didn't know you were on base." the archer said lightly, turning back around and moving to unload the pistols and put them away. From Fury's body language, he knew the reason for the visit wasn't urgent.

"Just making sure I still had a full recruit class." Fury said mildly, watching as the remaining men and women quickly exited the room when his gaze turned to them. "Well?"

"They almost earned themselves 4:30 drills, and I may or may not end up killing Recruit Maxwell before the week is over." Clint explained without so much as glancing at the director as he continued in cleaning up the range.

"Promising." Fury sighed, making Clint give an amused snort. "How's their performance?"

"It's the first day, sir. There's a reason I do my evaluations at the end of the week." Clint reminded lightly, one eyebrow raising as he turned back to look at the director finally. "What are you fishing for?"

"If you're done I'd like to have this conversation in my office." Fury informed him and Clint gave a slight roll of his eyes, but shouldered the quiver he'd brought out before and picked up the case of pistols, returning both to the weapons' room before following Fury out of the range.

Once seated in the director's office, Clint relaxed back and turned his expectant, curious gaze to the older man who sat down behind the desk and rifled through a drawer before pulling out a file, flipping it open, and sliding it across the desk to him.

"Jacob Flynn was recruited out of the FBI academy. Looking at his preliminary scores, I think you can guess why we were interested." Fury said lightly, nodding down to the sheet that was offered up in the file.

Gaze now predominantly curious, Clint reached forward and picked up the file scanning through it as an eyebrow raised and he gave a huff of slight surprise. He could definitely see what had caught SHIELD's attention. The recruit's scores in marksmanship, especially distance, were phenomenal.

"He's not as good as you." Fury acquiesced, sitting back and steepling his fingers. "But he's the best that's come through this agency _since_ we brought you in. And let's face it, Barton, you are the only distance assassin we have. We've made do with that for nearly the past eight years, but your main focuses have been elsewhere recently, and that's been making itself known. We've sent far too many close-quarters people into what should by all rights be distance territory. And since we haven't been able to figure out a way to get you in two places at once, there's one other way to fix the problem."

"I'm a field agent, sir, not a handler." Clint pointed out with a small frown. He got where Fury was going, but sitting through Flynn's training with him would take time, and subsequently take him off missions that cropped up.

"I know, Barton. You're not going to be his handler. But the time you're out of rotation to train him will more than make up for itself once Flynn gets into rotation." Fury pointed out before leaning closer, eye narrowing. "We were lucky when we brought you in. You already knew what the hell you were doing. This kid probably couldn't pick a good vantage point and stay unseen by his mark right now if he tried. You're the only one in the SHIELD network that can do those things effectively, and if he's going to be successful and not get himself killed, he needs to be able to."

Clint's frown deepened but he sighed and gave a slight nod, flipping through the rest of the file with muted interest.

"If anything relatively simple by your standards comes through, we'll let him shadow you." Fury continued once it became clear that the archer wasn't about to refuse. "You'll have the rest of this week to work with him either before or after general training."

"Does he know what you recruited him for?" Clint asked bluntly, and Fury met his gaze easily.

"He knows we recruited him to be a sniper. If he has an ounce of the brain capacity his records say he does, he should have a pretty damn good idea." the director said coolly, and Clint snorted but gave a acquiescing nod.

"When do you want me to start?"

"Go get him from his bunk room." the director ordered and Clint gave a slight roll of his eyes but stood and moved to exit the office, heading across base to the small wing set aside as recruit bunk rooms. There was a living room type area outside the collection of rooms, and this early in the evening, that's where he expected to find Flynn.

In fact, it was a majority of his recruit class that was milling around the room talking amongst themselves. Clint stopped in the door way and gave a few short raps on the wall.

"Recruit Flynn?" he questioned, eyes scanning the room until he found the slightly surprised man he was looking for. "With me if you don't mind."

"Yes sir."

The younger, dark haired, and lithely built man hopped to his feet and moved to follow him almost instantly. Clint led him back through the hallways, unsurprised when he spoke up questioningly after a few moments of silence between them.

"Can I ask where we're going sir?" Flynn asked and Clint responded without turning to look at him.

"Director Fury wants to speak with you." he said shortly, grinning slightly to himself when he practically felt the recruit stiffen. It wasn't often that Fury got involved personally, especially with recruits. That was bound to make him nervous.

They stopped at the director's door and Clint gave two quick knocks before taking a step back and turning around. He allowed his grin to show when he saw that Flynn's expression was blank and carefully masking confusion and nervousness.

"Relax." the archer said easily, making the recruit's eyes shoot to him. "You're not in any trouble."

Even that didn't serve to reassure the younger man, seeing as Fury's voice sounded heartbeats later, calling for them to enter. Clint opened the door and waved for Flynn to go inside the office and then followed, closing the door behind him and moving to take the chair he'd occupied before while Flynn stood in front of Fury's desk expectantly, back ram-rod straight.

"Recruit Flynn, I don't believe we've met yet." Fury looked up from the file he'd been reading, looking the recruit up and down consideringly. "I'm Director Fury. Have a seat."

Clint relaxed back himself as Flynn carefully did so in the remaining chair, still cautious.

"Agent Barton and I have been discussing your training." the director started again matter of factly a few moments later leaning forward and meeting the younger man's gaze. "What did Agent Hawthorn tell you about why we recruited you?"

"He said SHIELD needed me as a sniper, sir." Flynn said, tilting his head slightly to the side while Fury nodded.

"We do. Ultimately, SHIELD needs you in the same capacity as Agent Barton; a distance assassin." the director paused there, and both he and Clint studied the younger man's reaction carefully.

Flynn didn't seem surprised by the statement, though he was nervous almost, nodding shortly.

"Yes sir, I guessed as much. I just... I don't know if I'll be able to be as good as him." Flynn said, glancing to Clint quickly, causing the archer to smirk.

"Your preliminary scores are good." the archer told him matter of factly. "SHIELD wouldn't have taken you if they weren't. You're here because you're the best they've been able to find since recruiting me, and I physically can't be everywhere they need me. I can't guarantee you'll be as good as me, that's up to you, but we're going to be doing some training to get you as ready as I can possibly make you."

"Hawkeye will be conducting one-on-one training with you in skills that no one else at SHIELD could. All your other training will be conducted by your handler, to be assigned once you complete general training." Fury explained, leaning back as Flynn's expression grew almost awed. "In the interests of time, and wanting to get Hawkeye at least back into rotation as quickly as possible, you'll be starting training immediately, either before or after your typical training sessions."

"Understood, sir." Flynn nodded, but Clint just spoke up before Fury could continue, leaning forward and facing the recruit, eyes hardened and dark as he rested his elbows on his knees.

"Are you _sure_ that this is what you want to be doing?" he asked shortly, tone completely serious. "This is not any easy job by any stretch of the imagination. You could die. You could get hurt; tortured. You'll make enemies, and if you're any good at this, there will be a price on your head for the rest of your life."

Flynn met his gaze squarely, jaw clenching. Then he nodded, which caused Clint to straighten.

"You're prepared to end the life of another human being." he said bluntly, more a statement than a question. His eyes narrowed when Flynn gave a mere heartbeat's hesitation before responding.

"Yes sir." he said stiffly.

"Why?" Clint got to the crux of his line of questioning, tone expectant. He knew why he could do his job and for the most part be at peace with it. He did it to protect people; to provide all the justice he could to those beyond the reach or means of any normal legal system. To even attempt to make up for the innocent lives he'd taken as a contract killer. He didn't know why Flynn – a young man with any number of other opportunities before him – would pick this path.

"Why does anyone choose to be a soldier or a police officer, sir?" Flynn asked rhetorically, and Clint tilted his head slightly to the side and listened as the man continued. "To keep people safe. To make the world a better place. As long as I can see that there's a lot of reason, I'm not going to lose sleep over taking down someone that's hurting or killing innocent people."

Clint nodded slowly, not contesting that reasoning as Fury spoke up.

"And I can assure you that ample evidence will be given to you for each mission." the director said matter of factly, before glancing to Clint with a raised eyebrow. "Satisfied, Agent Barton?"

The archer gave a smirk, knowing that from anyone else, the question would have been sarcastic. Fury knew better than to think he'd train anyone that he didn't think was doing it for the right reasons.

"Yes sir." he said easily, looking to Flynn as the younger man glanced to him as well, expression openly curious and still slightly amazed.

"Good." Fury nodded before looking to the recruit. "What are you going to be working with him on specifically, just so I can let his handler know."

"Distance marksmanship, obviously." Clint started, thinking quickly, before nodding to himself as he continued. "Surveillance tactics, how to pick a good vantage point, probably some parkour. I'll keep you in the loop."

"Very well." Fury gave a short nod of acceptance, taking a few quick notes. "The distance range should be mostly clear right now. The only people signed in are a few of our strike team snipers that are getting in a little training."

"Shouldn't be a problem. They know by now that I like to train alone." Clint said dismissively, looking to Fury expectantly.

"Dismissed." he said simply, and Clint stood, jerking his head for Flynn to follow him. "Oh, and Barton. Do I need to find you a bunk room?"

"Unnecessary, sir. Stark's tower isn't that far." the archer turned half way back towards the director as he held the door open. Fury nodded again and turned back to a file on his desk and Clint followed Flynn out of the office, closing the door behind him and starting down the hallway.

"Sir?" Flynn caught up and stayed half a step behind him, and Clint just cast a quick glance of acknowledgment over his shoulder. "I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to give me extra training, I mean..." he trailed off and Clint gave a short nod.

"You're welcome." the archer said lightly. "I'm the only other distance assassin SHIELD has. Someone has to get you ready."

"Who trained you then?" Flynn asked, sounding slightly confused. "You don't look that much older than me to be honest, sir."

"I've been with SHIELD almost eight years. And I trained myself." Clint said evasively, before reaching into his pocket as he felt his phone vibrate. He already had a pretty good idea who it would be, and a look to the caller ID confirmed it. "Hey Stark."

'_Legolas, I would like to inform you, on behalf of mine, and everyone else's growling stomachs, that you are half an hour late.'_ Tony's mockingly aggravated voice came, and the archer rolled his eyes before responding.

"I'm not going to be able to make it, you guys go ahead." he said, pausing at the elevator.

'_What, Cyclops pull you into some more super-secret bullshit to get back at you?'_ Stark asked teasingly, and Clint snorted and shook his head.

"I'll explain when I get home later. I'm just gonna be a couple extra hours."

'_Tell you what, meet us at that little coffee house/bar thing you and Steve hang around sometimes. We'll get drinks and you can give us all the evidence you've accumulated today to back your claim that recruits are secretly demon-spawn.'_ Tony's voice was light and Clint couldn't help but to snort a laugh.

"Sounds like a plan, I'll let you know when I'm leaving." he said, pressing the button to call the elevator now that the conversation was almost over. Flynn was still waiting patiently by his side.

'_See you later.'_ Tony said cheerfully before hanging up, and leaving Clint to slid his phone back into his pocket and step into the now waiting elevator.

"The distance range is on the level below the parking garage." the archer explained, pressing the corresponding button before stepping back and looking over to Flynn. "I want to see how you do with a rifle for myself if you don't mind."

"Of course not, sir." Flynn responded instantly, hiding the slightly curiosity that had formed on his face during the conversation.

"Good." Clint gave a slight smirk, leaning against the elevator wall as it descended.

* * *

**There we are, and I hope you enjoyed that first chapter. Keep an eye out next Monday for the second chapter, and thank you for taking the time to read. Reviews are very loved and appreciated. :)  
~Dogstar**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hello everyone and welcome back to Repercussions! Thank you to everyone that has read/alerted/favorited/reviewed the story so far. Response has been overwhelmingly positive, and that makes me overwhelmingly happy. Here we have chapter 2, and I hope you all enjoy it. And know that reviews are beautiful and welcome. :)**

_**As always, I own nothing.**_

* * *

Clint's eyes scanned over the range quickly of their own accord as the elevator doors opened up into it, revealing the expanse of the long, brightly lit, concrete room. It stretched, he knew, for a little over two kilometers, underneath both the base compound in itself and the expanse of runways that were behind it. Giving a slight glance to Flynn, he stepped out of the elevator and focused instead on the three occupants of the range that were all standing a few yards to the right where their rifles were set up, and the control panels were situated. One of the men he recognized and he cracked a smirk, giving a slight nod as he walked towards him.

"Well aren't I glad we were just finishing up." the older man - Agent Rivers - drawled, shaking a few long strands of greying brown hair out of his eyes and offering his hand to Clint as he stopped a few feet away, Flynn still a half step behind him. "I'd heard the director had gotten you back on base for a while."

"A week. Pulled me into newbie duty." Clint said with a slight shrug as he shook the man's hand, before his eyes flashed to his two companions, who were both eyeing him with an air of curiosity.

"Oh, this is Agent Garrett, and Agent Ambrose. Their teams just transferred in from Britain and South Africa respectively." Rivers said, taking a small step back and gesturing to the other two men before glancing to them. "This is Agent Barton; better known as Hawkeye."

Clint gave them a slight nod, keeping his expression unchanging as theirs revealed their shock.

"It is certainly an honor to meet the great Hawkeye himself." the stocky, dark haired man that Rivers had pointed out as Agent Garrett said lightly, starting to offer his hand, before apparently thinking better of it after seeing Clint's almost completely blank expression. "I've got to ask, is it true that you don't miss?"

"Haven't yet." Clint responded dismissively, before glancing back to Flynn. "If you boys don't mind, Recruit Flynn and I have a lot of training to get through."

"Of course, we were just leaving anyway." Rivers said easily, moving to grab the rifles that they had been using and put them away.

Clint didn't respond, instead going over to the control panel and beginning to pull up a staggered series of targets that went the width and length of the room, the closest being 300 meters, while the farthest was at two kilometers. It was a typical enough range test; he wanted to see what Flynn could do in a controlled setting before deciding what he personally needed work on. He'd seen the scores, but that didn't mean he didn't want to see the kid's set up and technique for himself.

"Barton, do you not have a rifle in here anymore?"

Clint looked up as Rivers spoke to him from the doorway of the weapon's room before he responded.

"Nah, mine's back home. Didn't know I was going to be training distance today." he said coolly, pressing the final button to solidify the targets' positions and walking over to him. "We'll just use one of the public ones. He's going to be doing most of the shooting anyway."

Rivers gave a nod of acceptance, stepping aside and making for the elevator for himself. Clint didn't spare the other men another second of his attention, waving for Flynn to join him as he stepped into the weapon's room for himself. Floor to ceiling lockers went the expanse of both side walls, with a long table in the center of the room stocked with the supplies needed to clean a rifle. Each locker had an agent's name assigned to it, and though the first locker to the left had a plaque that read 'Barton', it was currently empty aside from a few spare boxes of ammunition and an empty travel case. Clint bypassed all of them and went instead to the wide locker that went the length of the back wall.

"This back here is for the publically available rifles for training purposes and such." he explained, punching in his passcode and sliding it open. "You'll get your own locker wherever you're stationed, which is probably going to be the helicarrier, and the SHIELD techs will put together a specialized rifle for you once you've cleared training and are put on active duty. You don't have access to these yet either; you'll get that once you're out of general at the discretion of your handler."

As he outlined that for Flynn, he carefully pulled out one of the long range sniper rifles and set it on the table before turning back to the locker, grabbing a box of ammunition, and closing it again.

"Procedure is to clean the rifle before and after use. Have you ever used anything like this before?" Clint asked, motioning for Flynn to join him in front of the rifle while the recruit shook his head.

"Nothing really this advanced, sir." he admitted, and Clint nodded, having expected a similar response and beginning to take the rifle apart.

"I'll show you how to do it this time, and when we go to put it away it's all yours."

That announcement had Flynn shifting closer and watching his actions carefully. It only took Clint a few minutes to take apart, clean, and put the rifle back together, explaining as he went. Then he was handing it over to Flynn, along with the ammunition, and gesturing him back out into the range.

"One shot for each target, if you don't mind." he said, watching as the younger man took it to the platform and began setting it up, laying behind it and getting into position behind the scope once it was loaded and ready. "Take a few at the first one to get used to the rifle if you need to."

Flynn nodded to confirm that he'd heard before sighting the first target and squeezing off a round. Clint's eyes went to the screen set up to the right of the platform the recruit was on, showing the target he had just hit. He made an impressed humming noise when he saw the bullet hole had nicked the edge of the bullseye. For that to be his first time of ever using that kind of rifle, even just at 300 meters that was good. He didn't say anything though, simply watching as Flynn fixed his aim and shot again. This bullet was closer to the center of the bullseye and he saw Flynn give it a short nod of approval before turning the barrel towards the second target.

In less than fifteen minutes, a bullet had left a neat hole on all seven of the targets, none being any further than one ring from the bullseye. Clint gave an impressed blink and smirked, stepping up to crouch at Flynn's shoulder.

"Very good." he said matter of factly. "Now, I want you to look at the 1.7 kilometer target again."

That had been the kid's worst one, though it still was only at the edge of the first ring. He saw Flynn duck his head to the scope again, sighting the requested target and aiming the rifle towards it.

"What threw off your shot there? Why was it lower than the others?" Clint asked expectantly, already knowing the answer for himself, but wanting to see if the recruit could pick up on it.

Frowning, Flynn propped himself up on his elbows to scan the length of the room with narrowed eyes. It took him a few moments, but eventually Clint saw his head tip to the side and his eyes widen slightly, before he looked back to him curiously.

"The air vent?" he asked, jerking his head towards the ceiling for emphasis. Clint nodded and spoke, his own eyes going to the target and the grating in the ceiling.

"The tiniest air flow can disrupt the path of a bullet at that distance. Look at the target before and after, take the differences in distance to the center, and adjust your shot." he instructed, watching as Flynn's eyes narrowed as he looked intently between the three targets.

After a few moments, he ducked back behind his rifle and positioned it carefully, before letting out his breath and firing. Looking up to the screen, Clint grinned when he saw the new bullet hole firmly within the bullseye.

"Now, you aren't always going to have discrepancies to judge by like you did here, but it's an easy way to adjust your shot in a controlled setting like this. We'll get into how to deal with wind and the like later. For now, I want you to give me shots into each of the targets, with the same level of accuracy, in four minutes or less. That's more than half a minute for each target." Clint said as he took a small step back and ignored Flynn's gaping stare. He simply raised an eyebrow, challenging the recruit to tell him he couldn't do it.

After a moment, Flynn's jaw clenched and he turned back to the targets and his rifle, sighting the closest target quickly.

"Speed doesn't mean a damn thing if you sacrifice your accuracy. So don't do it." he pointed out coolly, just as Flynn's first shot rang out. Six more followed rhythmically, and Clint noted with satisfaction that each bullet stayed within a few millimeters of the original.

After the final shot, the archer looked down to his watch as Flynn turned back to him expectantly as well.

"4:34." he said, making the recruit scowl lightly. "Go again."

* * *

It took two more tries, but eventually Flynn was able to successfully sight and shoot each target within four minutes while still keeping his aim consistent. Clint gave him a nod when he sat up onto his knees after he finished, stretching out his back.

"That's good enough as far as shooting goes for tonight." Clint said, starting to motion for Flynn to grab the rifle to put up, but before he could, the recruit spoke up, tone curious.

"How fast could you do something like that, sir?" he questioned, and the archer just snorted.

"This is your training, not mine recruit." he reminded, but Flynn continued stubbornly.

"I just want to have an idea what I need to shoot for." he said innocently.

"You shoot to get better." Clint said dryly, giving a slight roll of his eyes and moving to get behind the rifle anyways. Flynn quickly moved out of his way, watching intensely as he sighted the first target and pulled the trigger.

He then squeezed it again, moving the rifle before the first bullet had even lodged itself into the target. There were barely seconds in between each shot, and when Clint sat up a little more than thirty seconds later, a neat bullet hole having been made in the very center of each bullseye. He caught sight of Flynn's gob smacked expression and smirked as he rose fluidly to his feet.

"I've been doing this for years; this was your first night on this kind of rifle. You'll get there." the archer said knowingly, before motioning for the recruit to collect the rifle. "You need to clean that so we can put it back into the locker."

"Yes, sir." Flynn moved to do so, carrying the rifle back into the weapons room, sitting it down, and beginning to take it apart as Clint had shown him how to do before. He was decidedly slower than the archer had been, but thorough, looking to him for conformation as he began sliding pieces back together.

Once the rifle had been cleaned and put back in its place in the locker, Clint led Flynn out of the room and back to the elevator. As he pressed the correct button to take them back up a few levels, the archer turned to the younger man and spoke.

"I've got one more thing I want to work with you on tonight before I let you go back to your bunk. From now on, do you want to do your training in the morning or evening? It's probably going to be an additional three hours a day to get you ready as quickly as possible, that way I can get back into rotation where they need me." Clint explained, and Flynn gave a slow nod, looking to him.

"To be honest sir, it doesn't make much of a difference to me." he said, and Clint mirrored his nod and responded smoothly.

"Then we'll do an hour in the morning and two in the evening, ideally, of course." the archer informed him before stepping out of the elevator. He went a few yards down a hallway before punching his access code into a pad to the right of the door and pulling it open to reveal a training gym.

It contained another obstacle course, but this one was absolutely nothing like the general course Flynn had run this morning. It was made up of building facades, windows, roof-tops, and railings among other things to create a faux urban environment. There was a green flagpole with a line on the ground a few feet in front of them, and a barely visible red one across the gym.

"This," Clint started as he closed the door behind them and came up to where Flynn had stopped, staring at what outwardly seemed to be a jumbled mess of obstacles. "Is a parkour course. You know what that is?"

"It's like free running; treating the world like an obstacle course." Flynn said, looking away from the structures in front of him and back to Clint.

"Close enough." the archer shrugged, before giving the younger man a slight grin. "But it's going to become your best friend. You are going to rely on getting across whole cities to track a mark or scout a vantage point and not being seen. And while it's all nice and fun to blend in on the streets and follow someone at a leisurely pace, you can't exactly do that with a rifle on your back. Now parkour courses and actually running an urban environment are two entirely different things, but this one is good enough to let you get a feel for it before I take you out into the city to practice."

The archer paused, starting to move around the structure, and waving for Flynn to follow him.

"While being able to manipulate your body into doing what you want it to is important, you also have to train your mind to be able to pick out a course between roof tops and fire escapes and drain pipes. Your ultimate goal isn't speed, it's stealth, but speed can sure as hell come in handy. With this course, your goal is to get from start-" he nodded back to the green pole and line they'd just passed, "- to finish-" he nodded to the red one across the gym, "- without your feet touching the ground once. Now I'm going to run it with you once to help you get started. It isn't necessarily going to be the easiest or fastest way. It's up to you to make changes to the course I show you to make it better when you start running it by yourself."

Clint started making his way back to the start line after letting Flynn get a look at the length of the course. The recruit looked torn between nervousness and eagerness, which made Clint smirk as he stopped at the line on the concrete floor. He then focused on the task in front of him and leapt up and forward, snagging a metal beam and swinging himself up to plant his feet on the edge of a fire escape railing. He launched himself off of it easily, landing one hand on the narrow opening of a windowsill and tucking in on himself to vault through it and land on a concrete ledge on the other side. Flynn could still see him clearly so he motioned for the recruit to follow him, watching carefully as the younger man took a deep breath before copying his movements. He was stiff and clumsy, but he got himself to land beside the archer without falling and breaking something, so he gave an approving nod.

"Relax." he said matter of factly, poking the man's stiff arm where it was holding himself steady in a crouch on the small ledge. "Your body has to move fluidly, one action to another. Trust your instinct."

As soon as he finished speaking, Clint lightly dropped off the ledge, landing on a wide railing a few feet below and starting across it with steady footsteps until he could leap off and grab a drain pipe, scaling it quickly up to a roof.

"Think of it like the balance beam in the agility course." Clint coached when he saw the recruit eyeing the railing apprehensively. "The only difference between the two is how you see it. Stop looking at everything for its singular purpose; look at an area for its cohesion."

As he finished speaking, Flynn dropped off the ledge and landed in a crouch on the railing with his hands supporting in front of him. He then stood carefully and started forward, eyes on the drain pipe that was his next target. Clint noted with satisfaction that it only took him a moment to find viable hand and foot holds to propel him up and within moments, the recruit was next to him again.

Clint continued through the entire course slowly, helping Flynn where he seemed stuck and showing him how to manipulate everyday objects into a path that would go unseen by most anyone not actively looking for him. By the time they landed on the other side of the gym, just past the red line across the floor, Flynn had only fallen twice, and slipped just a handful of times more. He did, however, look much more relieved to be back on the ground. That just made Clint smirk as he looked to him and nodded back around the other side of the course. "Now try it by yourself."

Flynn gave a short sigh but obediently jogged back around to the other end and started again. For every change he made in the route Clint had showed him, the archer had him explain why he thought it would work better. There were times he was right, and times he had to pick his way backwards and find another way. But Clint did note that the longer Flynn spent on the course, the surer his movements became and the better he was able to keep up his momentum before pausing again.

"Alright." Clint spoke up to stop him after he had landed across the red line for the fifth time, out of breath and sweating slightly. "That's enough for tonight. Tomorrow morning I want you to meet me in the lobby at 6:30."

"Yes sir." Flynn puffed his understanding, shaking himself out quickly and moving to stand with the archer. He tipped his head to the side slightly as they started for the exit to the gym, looking to Clint curiously. "What do you want me to tell the rest of the recruits, sir?"

"The truth." Clint shrugged, before smirking. "Unless for some reason you feel like lying."

"No sir." Flynn said with a slight chuckle.

Clint bid the recruit a good night before making his way off base and pulling out his phone as he stepped out onto the streets of New York.

_'Jeeze, Barton, what are you doing? Burying a body?' _Tony quipped as he answered his phone, making Clint roll his eyes as he stuffed his free hand into his jacket pocket. Early March still had a high possibility of being chilly, especially after the sun went down.

"Any more smart ass comments like that and it'll be yours." the archer returned sardonically, making Tony huff from the other end of the line. "Don't get all worked up, I'm on my way."

It only took him maybe ten minutes to make his way to the little hole in the wall bar he was meeting the others at, instantly spotting them at a table near the far end of the bar. The place was never really crowded and tonight was no exception, a handful of other patrons scattered amongst the tables and bar stools. There was a single bartender managing things, a man Clint knew to be the owner, Dominic. Steve liked to sit down and have a conversation with him in the mornings around coffee, and when Clint joined the Captain on his run, he didn't mind tagging along, though he usually didn't do more than listen.

Even so, Dominic flashed him a wave when he entered and Clint returned it quickly before making his way over to the table with the others, skirting around them for the open seat that faced the rest of the bar with its back to the wall beside Natasha.

"Where's Bruce?" Clint asked, noting the other empty seat between Tony and Steve. There was a half empty mug of tea in front of it, so Clint knew the doctor had been there.

"You missed it, Featherhead." Tony snickered, while Steve gave a long, exasperated sigh and a shake of his head, which caused Clint to raise a curious eyebrow. "Capsicle got to break up a bar fight."

"Here?" the archer asked, a slight note of disbelief in his voice as he glanced around the quiet bar room.

"Okay, so maybe it was a couple hippie wanna-be's that went for some hard stuff instead of their usual non-fat soy mocha lattes," Tony said with a small shrug, waving that fact off as inconsequential. "But at least four punches were thrown before Captain Boyscout got up and pulled them apart. It was actually kinda funny to be honest. Steve had one hand on each of their shoulders and they couldn't even try to go at each other anymore, then-"

"Alright, I think Clint gets the picture." Steve cut in there with a glance to Tony, who gave an exaggerated roll of his eyes, before he looked back to Clint. "Bruce decided to head home after that. Anyway, so how were the recruits?"

"You mean besides hell spawn?" Clint asked innocently, before pausing as Dominic walked over to their table.

"Here ya go," the older man said, setting an unopened beer bottle in front of the archer and earning a nod of thanks. "Anyone else need anything?"

"I think we're good." Tony tossed out, raising his three-quarters of the way full glass. Thor spoke up as the bartender walked away, the demi-god turning his attention back to Clint.

"So the young agents of SHIELD did not respond well to their training?" he asked, and Clint snorted, popping open his beer and taking a small sip.

"Sure, after a bit of prodding." he said dryly. "Fury has me training agility and marksmanship."

He detailed for them how his day had went, feeling himself relax as he did so. This was something he'd rarely ever had before. A chance to just sit back with friends and relay his experiences around a couple drinks. It was so normal it almost hurt and he _loved_ it. For ten minutes, he wasn't acting as a master assassin, he wasn't shooting arrows at aliens or monsters or robots, his life wasn't hanging in the balance. His friends were engaged and interested in what he had to say, they cared. Natasha had casually laid her arm across his that rested against the table and leaned into his shoulder, listening to him speak with the smallest of amused grins on her face.

From his description of the recruits' training, Thor somehow got onto the subject of a warrior's training on Asgard, which led to Steve's experiences in boot camp for the Army, which Clint then supplemented with how the Army had changed its tactics over 70 odd years by telling them about what boot camp had consisted of for him. It took him a solid five minutes to realize that the information about his past had come as quickly and easily as breathing. He hadn't even thought about it before hand. And that just buoyed his mood even more.

* * *

By the time the five of them paused in their conversation and looked up, they were shocked to see that the rest of the bar was empty, aside from Dominic behind the bar cleaning glasses. Clint glanced to his watch and felt his eyes widen slightly at the sight that it was past eleven o'clock. He knew for a fact that the bar closed at 10:30.

"You should have just kicked us out if it was this late, Dominic." Steve spoke up, obviously having realized the same fact, but the balding man behind the bar looked up and simply waved off his concern with an easy grin.

"Don't worry about it. Not doing anything I normally wouldn't be." Dominic assured them, but even so the five of them stood by unspoken agreement and brought their empty bottles or glasses over to the bar. "You guys have a good night. And lady, of course."

He shot a grin to Natasha who returned it politely, before Steve spoke up with a slight nod.

"Yeah, you too. See ya later." the Captain returned before following Thor who lead them out of the bar and onto the street, the sidewalks still fairly populated even with the time of night.

"Ugh, I can't believe I let you people talk me in to _walking_ here." Tony groused under his breath, eyes narrowing as he pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders. "It's _two miles_ back to the tower. Do I look like I want to walk two miles?"

"You act like it's going to kill you." Natasha pointed out dryly with a raised eyebrow, making Clint snort his agreement. Their reaction only had Tony rolling his eyes and casting a mock-heated glare at them, which then earned a raised eyebrow from Clint.

"It's good for you to walk off all that Scotch, Tony." the archer said, hiding a grin under a placating expression as he lightly patted the billionaire's shoulder. Tony scowled at him then, shrugging his hand off in aggravation.

"I'll have you know that I am perfectly fit, thank you very much Barton." he retorted, but before the archer could retaliate, Steve raised a hand and waved it in between them.

"Alright you two." he said, the slightest note of firmness in his voice that had Tony rolling his eyes yet again, before he tossed an exasperated look at Clint who did grin then.

"The guy treats us like we're seven and incapable of getting into a good, verbal sparring match." Tony said lightly, earning a sigh from Clint and a slight shake of his head.

"Honestly, if I feel like verbally beating you into the dirt-," he started, only to look to Tony when the billionaire scoffed abruptly and cut him off.

"Oh, hold on a second Feathers." he said quickly, crossing his hands to make a 'T' shape and pausing in the sidewalk, making Clint and the others turn back to face him. "Like _you_ would win an argument against _me_. I've got like... at least ten years' experience on you insulting the hell out of people."

"Oh right, I forgot. You're the one fast approaching the other side of the hill, aren't you?" Clint tossed back, making Natasha bite the inside of her lip and the corner of her moth twitch in a barely hidden grin, while Steve outright chuckled and Thor looked a small bit confused.

Tony on the other hand, had crossed from mildly insulted to outraged. Clint laughed at the expression, shaking his head once Tony shoved him lightly and stalked past, muttering under his breath.

"Serves you right, Stark, always calling Steve 'gramps'." Clint pointed out but Tony just scoffed and pretended to ignore him as the others caught back up.

"I'll remember that." Tony shot back at him, but Clint really wasn't concerned, looking to Steve as the Captain spoke up, looking to him.

"So this recruit you're training," he started and Clint gave a small nod for him to continue as they continued walking. "I gotta wonder why Fury wants you to do it. I'd think he'd want you more in the field than a training gym."

"You're right about that, but to be honest, there's no one else to train the kid." Clint explained, making Tony cast him a glance of slight disbelief.

"You can't be saying that you're the only one in the entirety of SHIELD that can man a sniper rifle with any level of accuracy." the billionaire scoffed, but Clint shook his head.

"No, of course not. There are other snipers. But it's not just about the marksmanship, and I _am_ SHIELD's only distance assassin."

"And there's a distinction...?" Tony started, making the archer give a slight sigh.

"In the context of SHIELD, yes." he said, continuing at the curious glance from Steve. "SHIELD snipers work as part of a strike team providing aerial support and coverage for their missions. They aren't trained to track a mark through a city, or to work as a solo operative. If SHIELD wants Flynn trained as a distance assassin, which is what we need from him, I have to be the one to train him. Otherwise we throw him to the wolves unprepared and hopes he figures out a way to teach himself what he needs to do like I did."

"Gotcha." Steve nodded understanding while Tony just snorted, asking another question.

"Why are they so desperate to have another distance assassin now if they've just had you for the past eight years or so?" he asked and Clint shrugged.

"I haven't been going on missions with anything near the frequency of what I used to since New York. Neither has Tasha. We've been busy with the team, and everything's been kind of jumbled with us not being assigned a permanent handler since Phil died." the archer explained, his expression smoothing into nothing as he mentioned his former handler.

"Fury's _tried_." Natasha pointed out, earning a small angry snort from her partner. "But neither of us are exactly easy to work with and we won't just trust anyone. And not everyone trusts us. You get some idiot out in the field that wants to try to change the way we operate and nothing's going to go well."

"Sounds remarkably too complicated." Tony said dismissively, and Clint tilted his head to the side and shrugged agreement.

* * *

The next morning Clint spotted Flynn waiting for him in the lobby of base just like he'd asked as he passed through security exactly at 6:30. The recruit spotted him as well, standing as he approached and giving a slight nod.

"Good morning, sir." he greeted, and Clint returned the nod, before waving for him to follow as he started down one of the halls.

"This morning we're going to be working on how you're going to want to go about choosing a vantage point for a hit." the archer explained as they walked, Flynn instantly becoming even more alert and focused. "Most times it takes days of scouting your mark to find the best place and time to set up, but I can show you the basics of what to look for in a good point with a simulator to start with."

Clint paused as he got to a small briefing room he'd had Fury set aside for him for the morning and punching in his passcode to enter it. It was dimly lit as usual inside, a round table centered in the room. He went over to that as Flynn closed the door behind them and toyed with one of the touchscreens that were set into the glass table top, and within moments a holographic city block had flickered into being across the table. Flynn stepped up beside him, surveying it with an impressed air, before looking sideways to Clint as the archer began to speak.

"So we're going to assume your mark is here:" Clint reached forward to prod the hologram on a sidewalk outside one of the buildings. A red figure of a man appeared there, and the archer then took a step back. "Let's say it's around 10 pm. Where do you shoot from?"

"Uhm," Flynn's eyes narrowed as he considered the situation in front of him. After a few moments he pointed to a rooftop about 30 degrees to the left of the target across the street. Clint gave a small nod, simply asking another question.

"What's the range on your rifle?"

"About two kilometers, sir."

"The more of that distance you use, the harder it's going to be for anyone to spot you from the street. But with more distance, what do you have to be careful with to keep your shot accurate?" Clint prodded, twitching a grin when Flynn's expression clouded, only to clear after a few moments.

"Wind?" he asked, grinning when the archer nodded.

"Exactly. So you have to make sure there's something in your general vicinity that you can use to judge wind speed and direction. Flags can work." Clint told him, Flynn nodding in response before he continued. "All that in mind, where's a better spot to take your shot from?"

They continued like that, Clint teaching him how to use the sun's placement to his advantage when he was going to take his shot in the early morning or late afternoon. Flynn got better at choosing a vantage point without the archer's assistance steadily until Clint checked his watch and noted that they had fifteen minutes to join the rest of the recruit class in the training gym for agility.

The rest of the day, Clint noted that Flynn pushed himself even harder in training than he had the day before. Both of the sections they were doing were good leads ups into what the archer would have the recruit doing later that evening, and he apparently recognized that. That of course wasn't to say that the rest of the recruits weren't perfectly content to try their hardest to see which one of them he would shoot first.

Maxwell and Walker butted heads at least once per hour, steadily escalating in severity. It was impacting their training, as well as that of the rest of the class, and by the end of the day, Clint was done putting up with their squabbling.

"Maxwell, Walker!" he called both men back as the class made to leave the range that they had spent the last three hours in, working on marksmanship. Neither looked happy about being called back, glaring at each other accusingly as they made their way back towards where the archer stood, Flynn waiting off a few feet to the side. "Don't glare at each other; trust me when I say you're both equally at fault."

He waited until they were both in front of him, standing at attention before he spoke again, considering them both with slightly narrowed eyes and a cold expression.

"I do not care what differences the two of you have. You can do whatever you want with them before or after training. But during training, you are both to conduct yourselves professionally. You are to have the self-control to be able to work with someone, even if you don't necessarily like them, for the good of the assignment or mission as a whole. Anything less is sloppy, and I think you would have realized by now that this is not a sloppy agency. Simply put, if you do not conduct yourselves as SHIELD agents in training, you can be sure that you will not be put anywhere near the field as such, am I understood?" Clint asked pointedly, his gaze flicking back and forth between them.

"Yes sir." Walker was the first to respond, tone completely empty.

Maxwell on the other hand was content to glare a hole in the ground for a few long seconds before he grudgingly opened his mouth and repeated Walker's statement. Clint knew he wasn't going to get much better out of the recruit, so he gave a short nod before jerking his head towards the door.

"Dismissed."

He watched them both leave, door sliding shut behind them, before he glanced to Flynn who had a speculative look on his face.

"Who do you think's going to end up in the infirmary before the week is out?" he asked curiously, and the recruit snorted before responding without any hesitation.

"Maxwell." he said simply and Clint shrugged a nod of agreement, before waving him forward.

"Fair enough. Let's grab something from mess before we start."

* * *

**And there we have it, I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to tell me what you think, or any questions you may have. Other than that, I'll see you all next Monday with the next chapter.  
~Dogstar**


	3. Chapter 3

**And here we are, back for chapter 3! Thank you to everyone that has read, favorited, alerted, and reviewed to this story so far, the amount of support I've received for this story already is mind-boggling. This chapter is a small bit shorter than the others, but the next one's probably going to be a bit longer to compensate. I would like to apologize that this chapter jumps around a bit in the beginning though. **

**Someone asked me in a review how long I thought the story would be, and to answer, I'd have to say somewhere around the ten chapter mark. **

**That taken care of, and no other issues looming over my head to address, I'll let you get on to the chapter. Please enjoy, and if you are so inclined, leave a review with any comments or concerns you may have. And I apologize ahead of time for my use of an online translator for the small bit of Russian in this chapter.**

_**As always, I own nothing.**_

* * *

As the week went on, Clint steadily got into the rhythm of training. Walker and Maxwell had managed to simmer their animosity and as a result the entire class was able to run more smoothly, and Clint actually found himself enjoying it more than he thought he would. Of course, he understandably looked forward to his one-on-one training with Flynn far more. The dark haired recruit was dedicated, if he had to say the very least. He threw himself into the training, pushing himself to get better every day, no matter what discipline Clint had him focusing on. By Wednesday, Clint had him out on an unused runway to practice marksmanship, and in the city itself for parkour.

The archer picked a civilian or two at random and followed them through the city, letting Flynn take the lead after a few minutes and instructing the recruit on how to get the most information out of his surveillance; what to pay attention to, and what to dismiss. He seemed to catch on fairly quickly, and aside from almost breaking his neck on a slippery drain pipe, he kept up well. Clint was actually impressed with his progress; able to see how determined Flynn was to not only do well, but to excel. That knowledge made Clint breathe a little bit easier, knowing first hand just how hard this job was.

By Thursday, Clint found himself once again seated in a secluded corner of the mess hall for lunch, alone. He usually didn't stay long, preferring to get some practice in with his bow before marksmanship training. At the moment though, he felt someone approaching and he looked up, eyes flashing, only to blink in surprise when he saw Steve walking towards him, though the fact that he wasn't carrying a tray said he wasn't there to eat.

"Hey." he greeted, head tilting to the side as he took in the super soldier's small frown and his strained expression. "What're you doing here? Something wrong?"

The distance in Steve's eyes said his mind was elsewhere as he took a seat beside him, but the Captain just gave his head a quick shake and looked over, twitching a grin that was forced as hell.

"Nah. The director's just got some stuff he wanted my take on." Steve said, but Clint just raised an eyebrow, leaning his elbows on the table and looking over his friend critically.

Something was clearly wrong, no matter what he said. Steve almost looked shaken, or stunned maybe, and not much could evoke that kind of reaction from the man.

"Steve." he said pointedly, tone lowering, and the super soldier gave a sigh, recognizing the tone that said the archer wasn't buying it. He started to open his mouth to give an honest answer, only to pause with an almost apologetic expression.

"What's your security clearance?" he asked and Clint couldn't help a small grin at Steve's perpetual concern for making sure everything was by the book as possible. And it also peaked his interest considerably.

"I'm level 7, Cap. As high as you can go." he assured, before tilting his head slightly to the side with a raised eyebrow. "Course, that's also what they told me when they raised my clearance to level 6, so I'm not really holding my breath on this one."

Steve snorted a chuckle to that statement, but looked relieved, which Clint took to mean that that had been what he wanted to hear.

"Well this is only level 6, so I guess it's okay to talk about it with you." the super soldier reasoned, and Clint gave a small nod for him to continue, eyes narrowing slightly when Steve gave another small sigh and shook his head, leaning in on his elbows. "It's just... Director Fury brought me in for my take on a HYDRA sect that's been found near Prague, in the Czech Republic,"

Clint's eyes brightened with understanding as soon as Steve started and he relaxed slightly, expression becoming more sympathetic. Steve paused as soon as he looked up and saw that, his own expression morphing into one that was almost sheepish. Of course Steve, who had worked so hard, and given so much to put down HYDRA seventy years ago, would be an unhealthy combination of angry, worried, and confused that fragments of the organization were still being rooted out today.

"You get where I'm going with this." Steve prompted as more statement than question and Clint gave a small nod, watching as the other man scrubbed a hand across the back of his head and lowered his gaze. "I mean... I guess I just didn't think that HYDRA'd still be a problem you know?"

"There's been a couple little ripples, mostly in Eastern Europe, but never anything big Steve, nothing like before." Clint assured him, and was able to because he'd been part of some of the teams taking out those little ripples. His eyes narrowed again when Steve snorted.

"This' starting to look pretty big." he said, giving a slight shake of his head. "That's why the director wanted me involved, but... I have no idea what I'm doing." he gave a derisive chuckle then, which made Clint frown. "This isn't the HYDRA I dealt with. Not by a long shot. What makes it even better is that _they_ seem interested in _me_."

That caused Clint to straighten quickly, now much more concerned than he had been before. If anything even remotely having to do with HYDRA wanted at Steve, he considered that a serious cause for concern. A seventy year grudge wasn't pretty no matter how you looked at it.

"What do you mean by interested?" he asked, but the Captain was quick to wave off his concern, not that Clint was inclined to let that sway him.

"From what we know, it looks like they're just looking for information right now. Nothing anyone needs to be worried about."

"Yet." Clint countered, eyes narrowing. Steve gave a small grin and actually looked a little grateful as he responded.

"Trust me. The director's got people keeping an eye on it. If it seems like they're going to be more of a problem, I'll know about it."

The archer still wasn't fully satisfied, but there was nothing he could do about it, not having been read in or having any of the actual intel for himself. Instead, he looked back up to Steve and considered him carefully again. Part of him wanted to ask if the man was alright, but he knew that the Captain in him would keep up a strong bravado, especially in the SHIELD mess hall. So he didn't bother; not here anyway.

"You wanna take a walk?" he asked, jerking his head towards the door and not missing when Steve's eyes gave a quick relieved flash before he stood, Clint following his lead and dumping what remained on his tray before they both started out of the mess hall.

"How long do you have before your next class starts?" Steve asked, but Clint just shrugged.

"Plenty of time. And the range is already empty so we can talk there if you'd like." he said, and Steve gave a small grin to that, following his lead.

Clint talked with Steve until the recruits arrived, the Captain then leaving to go meet with Fury again. The rest of the archer's day was uneventful; Flynn's training once again talking them out into the city to do some practicing.

* * *

Friday was evaluation day. One by one, he had each recruit run the obstacle course by themselves, watching their progress carefully and marking down each of their times, mentally noting what he wanted to point out on the forms later. He smirked when he realized that all but two of the recruits had above average times, Flynn's being the fastest of his class at 5:32. That didn't surprise him, considering how much extra practice he had had in the form of their parkour training. Jones, however, wasn't far behind him at 5:47.

Overall, Clint was happy with the progress they had each made since the beginning of the week. Everyone had shaved at least a minute, in some cases almost two, off their original times. Considering that, he'd obviously done something right. After lunch, he gave their marksmanship evaluations, giving a series of targets that tested everything he'd taught them that week. They used actual pistols as opposed to the pellet ones, as they had been for the last two days of training.

After the last of the recruits had finished their evaluations, Clint took the daunting mountain of paper work he now had to complete and took to the catwalks above Hanger 2. Without his own bunk room, it was the closest thing to solitude he was going to get. And he wanted to get this done quickly, so he could finish setting up an assignment for Flynn over the weekend. The recruit was doing well enough with him that he wanted to send him off on something simple by himself. A little bit of surveillance and scouting.

Setting him on a random civilian, however, could lead to some issues if the recruit got himself caught.

Shaking his head to clear it and focus back on the task at hand, Clint twirled his pen in his fingers once before giving a slight sigh and starting to fill in the first form, which happened to be Maxwell's. The most obstinate of his recruits hadn't done as terribly as he'd been wary of, and even more surprising, he'd managed to keep himself out of the infirmary. Between Walker, and Clint himself, that was a feat.

Of course, he still made sure to note that the recruit was a nightmare to work with due mostly to arrogance.

His solitude managed to last for an hour and a half, but the quick, sure footsteps that crossed the metal grating were almost welcome at this point, seeing as his eyes were starting to cross, and words were running together.

"Director, I'm beginning to think that this paper work is more the punishment than the training itself." he remarked dryly, not needing to look up to recognize Fury's gait. The snort that he received in response only confirmed the director's presence, and Clint finally looked up as he sat the second to last of his reports to the side with the others that he'd completed.

"I'm just shocked it's actually getting done, Barton. You normally need to be hounded for weeks to turn in a mission report, much less ten recruit evaluations." Fury returned in a tone mirroring the archer's, which just made Clint twitch a slight smirk before he took to twirling his pen again as Fury leaned on the railing across from him.

"What can I do for you, sir?" he asked, ignoring the dig.

"I wanted to see how everything went." Fury said, nodding down to the last paper in Clint's hands. "Particularly with Recruit Flynn."

"He did well." Clint said matter of factly. "He's pushing himself, and he's getting better. I was thinking about sending him out on a little surveillance assignment for the weekend. Let him get a feel for it without me hanging over his shoulder. You know any agents that are going on leave, but staying in the city?"

"As a matter of fact," Fury thought for a moment, before giving a slight nod to himself. "I know just who to assign him to. Agent Newell is on leave for the next two days, and as far as I'm aware he's staying local. He's also going to be Recruit Flynn's handler."

Clint nodded to that, eyes narrowing slightly as he ran the name through his mind but didn't come up with anything. They hadn't crossed paths before, which could prove interesting.

"He still on base?" he asked, and Fury gave a slight shrug, before raising an eyebrow in question. "If this guy's going to be his handler, I want to tell him, so he can keep an eye out for Flynn, see how he does. He's going to need to get used to being able to spot him when no one else can anyway."

"If he is, we can have him meet us in my office." Fury said, not arguing with that logic and taking a step to the side, and giving Clint room to stand, which he did after gathering all the completed forms back into his file. "And I also wanted to let you know that you've got a mission briefing on Monday. Recruit Flynn will be shadowing you."

"Already?" the archer asked with a slight frown, casting a sideways glance at the director. The kid was barely out of general training, had only been working with him for a week, and Fury already wanted to put him in the field?

"Unless you don't think he's ready." Fury said, starting forward across the catwalk as Clint fell in at his side. "You'll get all the details Monday, but the mission's fairly simple."

Clint gave a shrug to that, but didn't verbally respond. Fury wasn't an idiot; and he sure as hell wouldn't want a mission compromised. That still didn't keep the thought that the director was keeping something from him from itching at the back of his mind.

The two of them walked back to the director's office, Fury calling over his radio to find Newell and get him directed there as well. And thankfully, after waiting for only five minutes or so, the man joined them. Clint considered him carefully with a blank expression at first, noting that he was middle-aged and hazel-eyed, with cropped blonde hair. He greeted Fury with a slight air of confusion, before realization sparked as he turned and looked at Clint.

"Agent Barton," he said lightly, turning to better face the archer, but wisely not offering his hand. "I don't believe we've met. Ben Newell."

Clint gave him a slight nod of greeting, before he snorted and twitched one corner of his mouth into a sarcastic smirk.

"Well apparently I need no introduction." he said lightly, catching the quick glance that the agent sent to Fury, as well as the dismissive wave the director gave before sitting behind his desk. Newell looked almost grateful as he did the same in one of the chairs across from the director's desk, but Clint just leaned his elbows on the one he stood behind.

"I assume this is about Recruit Flynn?" Newell asked, voice still pointedly professional, and Clint gave a nod.

"I wanted to send him on a little training assignment this weekend, to see if he can use the skills I've taught him this week effectively on his own. Surveillance mostly. Director Fury tells me you're going on leave this weekend."

Newell nodded understanding, evidently seeing where Clint was going with the conversation. Even so, he didn't comment himself until the assassin continued, which he did smoothly.

"As far as he's going to be concerned, you won't know that he's following you. If you spot him, and it's not overly blatant, don't draw attention to it. Watch what you can; it'll start to give you a feel for how he works in the field."

"Understood." Newell nodded again, before he gave a small smirk and asked a question. "How hard am I supposed to make this for him?"

"Don't act any differently than you normally would. Don't actively try to lose him, or make it obvious you know he's following you, unless he's made it obvious first." Clint responded matter of factly, and once again Newell nodded. "What time were you planning on leaving base?"

"0800 tomorrow." the handler said and this time Clint gave the nod.

"Thank you, Agent Newell, we'll see you Monday." Fury spoke up then, effectively dismissing the man. His words, however, caused Clint to frown as Newell stood and moved to leave the office. As soon as the office door snapped shut, the archer spoke.

"He's coming to Taiwan."

The words weren't a question. And Fury knew better to take them as such. Clint's tone of voice alone said volumes about what he thought of the idea, and the director met his gaze steadily as he responded.

"Yes, Agent Barton, he is." Fury said pointedly, continuing before Clint could voice whatever protest that his scowl was almost definitely going to lead up to. "He's been made aware that he's there in just as much of a learning capacity as Recruit Flynn is. He's an experienced handler, and he knows what he's doing, but he doesn't pretend to understand the intricacies of a distance mission, and he'll be looking to you for advice on how he can best be the support that Flynn needs on an operation."

"So help me God, director, if he tries to change how I operate in the field..." Clint trailed off ominously, snorting coldly when Fury just sighed.

"Barton. _No one_ I try to assign you to is going to be Coulson." the director said heavily, and for a moment Clint's eyes blazed before they shuttered completely, making the older man give a slight shake of his head. "You _know_ I miss the man just as much as you do, but I'm running out of options here. You. Need. A. Handler. It's like you're blatantly trying to piss off every single agent I try to set you up with."

Clint pointedly didn't respond, keeping the cool, emotionless mask across his expression. Every agent the Fury tried to put him with on a mission was either: A) too scared of him for Clint to be able to take seriously, B) too much of a controlling jerkwad to allow him to conduct his missions the way he needed to, even when he _wasn't_ breaking protocol, or C) treated him like a dog on a leash, worth no more than the weight of his arrows. There had only been one of option C. And it wasn't even something Clint had done that had gotten him reassigned.

No, that had been a combination of Natasha and Steve, after Clint had come home from a mission not having slept or ate in at least 48 hours and acting bitter enough to worry Tony.

Fury's gaze searched him critically, before scowling when it was clear that Clint wasn't going to respond to him.

"Damn it, Barton, if you won't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it." the director growled, and for a few moments Clint didn't respond. And when he did, it wasn't at all in the manner Fury wanted.

"If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd like to go inform Recruit Flynn of his assignment." the archer said coolly. Fury's eye twitched and he started to open his mouth to likely ream his ass. Instead, he almost seemed to think better of it and forced out a single terse word.

"Dismissed."

* * *

If the recruit seemed daunted by the task that Clint had given him, he tried really hard not to show it, he listened intently to the parameters Clint gave him; to spot his mark when he left base at 0800 and follow him from there, to keep on him mostly from above unless it was impossible, to keep track of where the men went at what time and any routines he seemed to have, and be able to identify the best place and time for him to take his shot if he had to make one. It was clear that he wasn't comfortable with the last one, thinking of a fellow SHIELD agent as a mark, but Clint simply informed him that if _he_ could have the shot, so could any other potential assassin.

_ Even if you're running a protection detail, you think like the would-be assassin so you know how to best protect your mark._

Flynn had warmed up slightly to the idea after he pointed that out, and agreed to meet him back at Stark Tower at 2100 Sunday night so Clint could walk him through a proper debrief. Even if he wasn't a handler, Clint knew how one worked and what questions were typically asked, seeing as he'd been through more than his fair share. After making sure the recruit understood, he had finished up his last report, dropped them off at Fury's office without a word, and went home.

Clint, for his part, really enjoyed doing completely nothing for the weekend. He played video games with Steve, sparred with Natasha, _somehow_ got talked into a Disney movie marathon with Thor on Sunday morning that ended up with everyone sitting around the couches arguing which movie was the best, but by far the most enjoyable was probably pestering Tony down in his lab. The billionaire was far too easy to annoy for it not to be hilarious. Of course, he had a sneaking suspicion that Tony acted annoyed more than he actually was, but that wasn't an issue for him.

One thing he had discovered though, was that Tony was in no way comfortable with him sitting perched up on the platform above the lab. It didn't matter what either of them were doing, or who else was in the lab, he just constantly seemed to fidget and cast quick, unreadable glances up to him. And Clint could take the hint. He didn't know what caused the little quirk or what exactly it was about - somehow he wasn't convinced that it was just his presence - but his friend was uncomfortable and that was enough. Tony hadn't commented when he'd perched himself on the edge of an unused lab bench instead, but Clint could have swore that the flash in his eyes when he had turned back to his suit was one of gratitude.

Sunday night, Clint was in the common area and waiting for Flynn half an hour before he was supposed to be there, watching Steve hand Tony his ass in Mario Cart. It was amusing, to say the least, and Tony's cursing got infinitely more creative as time went on.

_'Sir, the security team would like me to inform you that there is a Jacob Flynn here to see Agent Barton.' _JARVIS' voice sounded two minutes before nine o'clock, and Clint gave a slight grin when Tony was too enthralled with his game to respond.

"Go ahead and let him up JARVIS." he responded, standing smoothly and going over to snag a Gatorade from the fridge for the recruit. He was bound to be tired, and probably starving.

_'Of course sir.'_

It took less than two minutes for the elevator to _ding _its arrival at the floor, and Clint grinned when he saw the recruit step out almost hesitantly, looking around himself in what almost looked like awe. Relief flashed in his eyes when they landed on him, and he started forward at the archer's waved invitation, giving a slight nod of greeting.

"Recruit Flynn. How'd it go?" he asked, motioning for the dark haired man to take a seat at the table and sliding the Gatorade towards him, which was received with a nod of thanks.

"Pretty well, I think. He didn't act like he saw me at any rate, and I only lost him once, for an hour or so." Flynn said, looking up to him then for approval, which Clint gave in a slight nod.

"For your first solo assignment, that's good." he assured, before leaning forward onto his elbows and continuing. "Now, walk me through everything you learned about Agent Newell that would be mission-relevant."

It took a little more than thirty minutes for the mock-debrief, but that wasn't unusual even for a two-day op, especially seeing as Clint kept throwing in questions asking why what Flynn was telling him was relevant, or how it could be used to further a mission. Overall, he was impressed by the recruit's performance, and he was feeling decidedly less edgy with having the kid shadow him on a mission than he had been when Fury had proposed it.

By the time they had finished, Flynn looked even more worn and exhausted, and Clint clapped him on the shoulder as he stood, going over to the kitchen.

"You hungry?" he asked, snagging the now empty Gatorade bottle as he went and shaking Flynn out of the thoughtful, somewhat amused expression he had been wearing as he had been watching Steve and Tony playing the video game.

"Definitely, sir." he said empathetically, and Clint grinned, dropping the empty bottle into the trash and instead grabbing a plate, and the pan of leftover chicken potato bake that hadn't yet be put up.

Sure, he could take Flynn back to base and let him hope that the mess hall was still serving something edible, but they both had to be at SHIELD for the same reason the next morning, so it made just as much sense to let the recruit that looked dead on his feet bunk here for the night.

"Oh Featherhead, you've got the poor rookie deluded into calling you sir." Tony sniggered, before he yelped in protest as Steve obviously did something to impede is progress in the game.

"Laugh it up, Stark." he said with a slight roll of his eyes, depositing the plate, along with another unopened Gatorade in front of Flynn. "Meanwhile, _I'll_ be laughing at the fact that you - genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist - still can't beat a guy that was born in 1920 at Mario Cart."

Flynn snorted into his plate to hide his amusement, while Steve didn't bother, laughing almost smugly. Clint grinned and returned to his seat as Tony started pouting. He was the only one that could dish the borderline insulting banter back to Tony effectively enough to have the billionaire bowing out, a fact that amused everyone else to no end, especially Pepper.

He seemed to get over it fairly quickly as always, getting back to soundly cursing Steve under his breath within minutes. It was then that Clint looked up again, directing his words back over in his direction.

"Hey Tony, you got a guest room Flynn can bunk in for the night?"

"No." Tony returned instantly, still sounding a little bitter. Flynn raised an eyebrow at that, looking almost cautious, but before Clint could wave it off, Tony was continuing. "I've got a guest floor though. Guest room; psh. What kind of self-respecting eccentric billionaire do you think I am, Barton?"

"My mistake." Clint said dryly with a roll of his eyes, and waving for Flynn to follow him once he'd finished eating. "JARVIS, what's an open guest _floor_ then?"

_'Floor 62 is the closest, sir.' _the AI returned, while Flynn looked up with a sharp gaze.

"Stark's AI." Clint said as way of explaination, pressing the button for the elevator, and stepping aside when the doors opened and revealed the vibrant red flash of Natasha's hair.

Thor was with her, both looking worn from training. Natasha's eyes flicked over Flynn, body tensing in a way that was unnoticeable to anyone else before they flashed to Clint just as Thor spoke.

"Friend Hawk, may I ask who accompanies you?" the demi-god asked with a slight tilt of his head out of curiosity.

"This is Recruit Flynn." he introduced, before jerking his head toward his two team mates. "Flynn, this is Thor and Agent Romanoff."

"Pleasure." the dark hair recruit nodded to them quickly to cover his shock, especially when Thor reached forward and clapped a hand on his shoulder as they both stepped out of the elevator.

"The Hawk speaks well of your progress, young agent of SHIELD." Thor praised with a wide, beaming grin, which Flynn returned hesitantly.

"Thanks." he said, looking to Clint quickly, and the archer just grinned.

"If you'd excuse us guys, he probably wants to find the closest bed after 36 hours of surveillance." Clint pointed out, and Thor patted Flynn on the shoulder again before moving past them, calling out to Steve and Tony.

"Вы принимая его обратно в базу?" (Are you taking him back to base?) Natasha asked as Clint and Flynn stepped into the elevator, and Clint turned back to face her and respond.

"Нет, мы оба получили, чтобы вернуться завтра утром так или иначе, он просто собирается двухъярусная здесь." (No. We've both got to be back tomorrow morning anyway; he's just going to bunk here.) he responded, and she gave him a short nod, and Flynn a piercing glance before she turned and stepped away from the elevator as well.

When the doors slid shut, the recruit at his side spoke, shifting almost uncomfortably from foot to foot.

"Sir, I can just go back to base, I don't want to-," he started, trailing off when Clint gave a quick shake of his head and an easy smile.

"It's no trouble. I need to be on base tomorrow with you anyway." he said, before responding to the curious glance Flynn sent him. "We've got a mission briefing."

"What?"

Clint chuckled at the sheer shock in his voice, before he spoke again as the elevator doors opened on the right floor.

"Relax, you're just shadowing me; you won't be doing anything by yourself. Your handler's coming with us. Just get some rest, we'll get all the details tomorrow."

"Yes sir." Flynn huffed out a long breath, before looking around himself with clear appreciation. "And thanks."

"Get some rest." Clint repeated, before stepping back into the elevator. He needed to make sure his go-bag was packed and his weapons were cleaned.

* * *

By seven the next morning, Clint had led Flynn into the briefing room that the receptionist in the lobby had directed him to with the comment that Fury was waiting for them. Again, Flynn looked nervous by the director's presence, but that had mostly been hidden by the time Clint opened the door and strode in, dropping his duffle carefully in the back of the room before taking one of the seats across from where Fury and Newell stood watching them enter. Flynn took a seat too, though Clint saw his eyes widen in shock when he looked up and recognized Newell. He then rounded on Clint.

"_He's_ my handler?" the recruit hissed, and the archer chuckled before nodding to Newell who was grinning and stepped around the table to offer his hand.

"Recruit Flynn. It's nice to actually meet you. I was impressed by how well you did this weekend; I only spotted you twice, and that's because I knew to look for you." Newell said, and Flynn glared at Clint for a moment before accepting the other man's hand and returning his grin.

"Thank you, sir." he responded, and Newell gave a slight nod before retrieving the two files Fury offered him and passing one to each Flynn and Clint.

"Any more reservations, Agent Barton?" Fury asked gruffly, and Clint glanced up to him as he flipped open to the first page of his file.

"No sir. What d'we got?" he asked smoothly, turning his eyes to the face that stared up at him from the file. The man was surly looking and scowling, eyes cold and dangerous. He didn't look like he was originally from Taiwan in any sense; more likely South America.

"This is Emilio Mancilla, a four year veteran of talking people into loyalty towards various drug cartels. Lately he's been getting bold enough to garner our attention, responsible for the deaths of three staff members of a South African diplomat." Fury started, tone completely cool and emotionless as he outlined the target. "He's no assassin, but he's dangerous. Which is why we want this distance, as opposed to putting our people face to face with him."

Clint nodded understanding, expression hardened as his eyes flashed. This man tortured people for a living; he didn't want agents on the ground either. Mancilla couldn't torture what he couldn't even see coming, like him and the deadly point of one of his arrows.

Fury continued to explain that Mancilla would be in Taiwan securing the safe passage of a cartel-run cargo ship through the port of Xiaogang on the southeastern coast of Taiwan. The ship was due to dock in three days, but they didn't know exactly when Mancilla would be arriving. It would be their job to track down Mancilla and take him out as cleanly as possible. Clint could see how Fury considered it simple. Ideally, he'd just have to set himself up somewhere near the docks and wait for Mancilla to show himself. An in and out that should just involve a bunch of sitting and waiting.

Of course the ideal wasn't always what he got handed in a situation, but he could hope.

By the time Fury had finished with what he wanted to present personally, Flynn was looking more than a little overwhelmed.

"Any questions?" the director asked gruffly, speaking almost solely to Clint. The archer flipped his file shut, knowing he'd look it over much more thoroughly on the jet, and help Flynn make sense of everything. Just as he looked up to assure the director that he was good, Newell spoke up with a slight frown.

"Is there going to be a language barrier with the locals?" he asked, and Clint snorted as he stood, going to collect his duffle from the back of the room.

"I speak Mandarin." he responded matter of factly before Fury could. Newell blinked at him but nodded acceptance. Clint then looked back up to Fury. "Jet?"

"Leaving here in twenty." the director informed him matter of factly before he twitched the ghost of a grin and nodded to Flynn. "I figured you'd have your hands full so I got a pilot to fly you into Xiaogang. Happy hunting, Hawkeye."

Clint gave a quick, two-fingered salute in response as he fixed the shoulder strap of his duffle and jerked his head for Flynn and Newell to follow him out.

"You've probably got to get a bag packed," he started looking to Flynn who nodded as he continued. "Don't be late; we'll meet you in the hangar bay."

"Yes sir." Flynn said, turning off and jogging down another hallway.

"And I've got to get him assigned a service pistol before we leave." Newell muttered mostly under his breath, before looking shrewdly at Clint. "Not that you probably have your own small armory anyway."

Clint gave a small shrug but didn't verbally respond, watching as he too peeled off down another hallway while the archer continued on to the hanger. Within ten minutes, Newell had rejoined him at the jet they were assigned to, and not five minutes after that, Flynn jogged up, slightly out of breath and carrying what looked like an almost new black SHIELD duffle.

"Agent Flynn." Clint smirked when he could hear the grin in Newell's voice, and he turned back around, leaning against the side of the Quinjet just inside the ramp to watch as Flynn accepted the pistol and its holster with wide eyes.

* * *

**There we have it; I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to leave a review, but other then that, I'll see you again next Monday.  
~Dogstar**


	4. Chapter 4

**Hello everyone! First off I'd like to apologize for not posting a chapter last week, but unfortunately life has this thing with curve-balls. At any rate, I'd like to thank every one's whose taken the time to read this, and especially those who have reviewed. I am still in the process of responding to the ones from last chapter, but I thought it was best to get this up first.  
****But because of the terrible wait I put everyone through (and partly because of the end to this chapter) I will be posting another chapter this week, most likely on Thursday or Friday, so keep an eye out for it.  
I'd also like to point out that there are going to be some bold sections of dialogue. Pretend they're in German. There's going to be a lot of German-speaking going on in the next chapter or two, and for the sake of easy reading, I decided not to translate it.  
So, please enjoy the chapter, and if you'd like, leave me a review to tell me what you think.**

_**As Always, I Own Nothing**_

* * *

By the time their jet landed in Taiwan, Clint had managed to work through the entire briefing with Flynn. Considering it was a fifteen hour flight, he had enough time and more in which to do so. Flynn seemed to take everything in with at least some level of comprehension, but Clint knew everything would make much more sense once he got to see how everything played out in the field.

"So how do you want to run this?"

Clint blinked in slight surprise at Newell's question as the three of them walked off the ramp of the Quinjet and down the runway. He knew that Fury had said that the older agent would be looking to him, but he hadn't expected to actually be able to run the op the way he wanted. He certainly wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, though, and he spoke matter of factly.

"If you're good with heading to the safe house and getting everything set up, me and Flynn will go down to the docks, see what everything looks like and get a feel for it." he said, feeling slightly impressed as Newell gave a nod of acceptance. He then looked at his surroundings with slightly narrowed eyes. It may have been a fifteen hour flight, but with time zones being what they were, they had lost a full day. It was technically around noon on Tuesday. The cartel's ship was due to make port Friday night. He wanted to have a bead on Mancilla before then, and maybe even have the guy taken out before he got the chance to use his 'skills' on some poor customs' official or something. "We'll do some scouting for a few hours, come back, try to work a plan, and go back once the sun goes down. The guy's good, but he doesn't have the finesse to do his stuff in the middle of the day. If we spot him, it's gonna be at night."

He'd taken a look at Mancilla's work that SHIELD had on record. He was messy, remarkably unorganized, and frankly Clint was stunned that he had managed keep himself alive this long. Either way, the work still spoke for itself: effective, brutal, and very capable of proving its point.

When Newell pulled up to where Clint and Flynn were waiting with a rental car, the archer went ahead and dropped his duffle into the backseat before cataloguing the weapons he had on his person; a pistol, two combat knives, and a dagger. He wasn't going to take his quiver now, when he was walking streets in the middle of the day.

He stepped aside so Flynn could do the same, before he leaned in through the passenger window to speak to Newell.

"Call me if there's any problems, otherwise we'll meet you at the safe house around five or so." he said, and the handler nodded.

"You know where it is?" he asked, and Clint gave his own short nod of conformation. He'd memorized a basic layout of the city during the flight. Port was two miles from the airport, and their safe house was about eight miles north west of port. He could get himself and Flynn between those three points easily. "Then I'll see you in a couple hours. Be careful."

Clint bristled slightly at that but didn't show it, tapping the roof of the car twice as he stepped back and watched Newell pull away from the curb. He then looked to Flynn and jerked his head down the side walk and had the new agent fall in at his side as they walked into the city itself and out of the airport.

"We're probably not going to be able to get into the port itself until later tonight, but I want to get a feel for any entrances and exits, and the surrounding area." Clint explained, and Flynn nodded, stuffing his hands into his pockets as he responded.

"So we're keeping to the ground for now?" he asked, and the archer nodded, casually weaving in and out of other pedestrians and his eyes scanned the street.

There wasn't so much as a ripple of an issue in the hours that Clint and Flynn casually combed the streets near the port, getting a feel for the buildings, where their best point of entry would be, and how hard it was going to be to keep from being seen when they took to the rooftops. There were a few warehouses that they could use, as well as the stacked cargo containers themselves if they wanted to get closer to the docks. Flynn, to his credit, didn't seem completely lost, able to answer the questions that Clint tossed out to him confidently. He knew that the kid wouldn't be nearly as confident once the sun went down and he was having to sit in the same position for hours on end, but that was to be expected.

Their safe house turned out to be just outside the outskirts of the city proper, one of many small houses bunched together in clusters. The rest of the cluster they were in seemed vacant, which wasn't really surprising, and Clint found the key pad at the door without issues and typed in his access code. It was two rooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom, the room off the kitchen holding the table and a couch, while the other room contained three cots.

"Before you ask, yes, this is a typical safe house." Clint informed Flynn as he closed the door behind them, and Newell looked up from where he had set up the map and most of their intel on the table.

"I radioed in that we arrived and got our comm channel set up." Newell informed them, standing from his seat and gesturing over the spread before looking to Clint. "How'd it go?"

"Fine, we just got a feel for the area surrounding the port; we couldn't actually get in to take a look around it. We'll do that later." Clint said lightly, moving to look at the map and grabbing a pen to mark the entry points to the port.

* * *

About thirty hours later, Clint was resting his head on his arms, eyes narrowed and scanning the dimly-lit open area of concrete that expanded between the warehouse he was perched on the roof of, and the customs' house where three men were currently stationed. All three had checked out as customs' officials, Clint having had Newell run their faces the first night of their surveillance. Now, on the second night, everything seemed quiet.

So far, there hadn't been so much as a whisper of Mancilla's presence, and with the cargo ship's arrival in almost exactly forty-eight hours, Clint was starting to wonder just how sound their intel was. There was sloppy, and then there was stupid. His mark was the latter if he was the kind of guy that went in with less than twenty-four hours to spare to get a job done.

Just as he had the thought, his eyes zeroed in on movement to the far west of his field of vision, a shadow lurking between cargo containers near the docks and inching closer to the customs' house. He watched the shadow intently for a few moments, feeling a small predatory smirk slide onto his face as the figure passed quickly through the beam of one of the lamps that lit the cargo area of the dock. There was enough time for him to confirm that the shadow was Mancilla himself.

"Flynn, my two o'clock, confirm presence of our mark." Clint murmured, reaching up to his ear to speak into his comm. He had positioned Flynn in his blind spot on the other side of the customs' house, on top of a stack of three cargo containers. His smirk twitched wider when he heard Flynn suck in a small, shocked breath before clearing his throat and responding just as quietly.

_'Confirmed.'_

There was the tiniest hint of wariness in the new agent's tone, but Clint ignored it, keeping his eyes glued to Mancilla. The guy was stalking around, seeming to be getting a scope of the place and _his_ target, attention solely focused on the customs' house. Clint reached his hand back up to his ear and spoke to Flynn again, not moving a single muscle that was unnecessary for that action.

"See if you can't get a good picture of the guy's face and take it back to Newell to confirm as well." he ordered, and there was a few minute's pause in which Flynn was probably waiting for the guy to step under another lamp, before his voice returned, more confident than it had been before.

_'Got it.'_

he said, and Clint gave the smallest of nods.

"Radio back to me when you've got conformation." he said, and he could almost feel Flynn's own nod of assent.

_'Yes sir.'_ he agreed, before there was a small pause and he continued. _'Are you going to...?'_

"No." Clint said, already knowing where the agent was going.

Yes, he had his quiver with him, and yes, he could take the shot as soon as he got conformation from his acting handler, but he could tell by the way Mancilla was acting that he wasn't making a move tonight. Tonight was _his_ surveillance. And Clint was curious as to whether or not the guy or his employers already had someone else in the city on their payroll. There was only one way to tell if there was.

"I'm going to stay on him, follow him, see if I can't find where he's holing himself up and who he's in contact with."

_'Yes sir.'_

There wasn't a single audible or visual clue that Flynn had left, but Clint didn't really expect there to be one, so he just hunkered back down and kept his eyes trained on his mark. Mancilla circled the customs' house once before he settled himself in the shadow of one of the containers to watch the door.

_'Sir?' _Flynn radioed back after maybe twenty minutes and Clint put his hand to his ear almost immediately.

"Go ahead."

_'Agent Newell has confirmed that it's Mancilla.' _Flynn said before pausing for a few moments. _'And uh... He's ordering you to take the shot, sir.'_

Clint couldn't help arching an eyebrow with that, eyes narrowing and sparking with a defiance that no one was there to see. No one ordered him to take _any_ shot. He was not just a bullet in a gun, and he would take out his mark when he thought it was best. Knowing whether or not Mancilla's cartel had any other ties in the city would provide SHIELD with intel it didn't already have. Intel that would prove useful down the line, and could potentially save lives.

"You can tell Agent Newell that I will take my shot when I believe that no further information can be gathered from the target." he said lowly, sharp eyes tracking Mancilla's every move as he shifted to a different section of shadow. "Until that time, I will continue to track his movements."

There were a few long, tense moments of silence, and he could only imagine the argument Newell was putting up. In the end though, it was Flynn's voice that came back again, sounding empty.

_ 'Yes sir.'_

There wasn't another word from the comm after that, and the archer returned his full attention to the man in the shadows of the cargo containers.

Clint knew that the three officials had a clock-work like security sweep pattern, one of them leaving every thirty minutes to check a different section of the port. He suspected that Mancilla already knew that somehow as well, seeing as he was ready with a darkened camera phone every time the half hour was up, probably taking pictures of the customs' officials' faces.

Dawn was just barely beginning to brighten the horizon when Mancilla finally moved.

The man moved through containers back the way he had come hours earlier, and Clint followed him near silently, sticking to the roofs of warehouses where he could, and the tops of containers when he had to. No matter how hard he tried to maintain his silence, the steel containers always made some sort of noise at his boots' impact.

Even so, Mancilla never once looked up and continued out of the port and back into the city itself as the sun continued to rise and brighten the streets.

* * *

It was noon before Clint returned to the safe house, starving, thirsty and exhausted. He was greeted by a scowling Newell and an apologetic looking Flynn, the older man's arms crossed over his chest and eyes narrowed into an accusing glare.

"What kind of game are you playing, Barton?" Newell demanded, starting to take a step toward him but evidently thinking better of it as the archer continued further into the safe house and slid his quiver off his back, depositing it into an empty chair. Clint turned his head slightly towards Newell but didn't fully face him, listening as he continued. "You go in, you eliminate the target, and you get out. That's your job, not further investigation."

"Believe it or not, I don't need you to tell me what my job is, Newell." Clint said, voice lowering before he turned back to the map and made a few X's on the map. He'd followed Mancilla around, found a restaurant he seemed to frequent, if the fact that the waiter knew him by name - a fake name, of course, but a name none the less - meant anything. He'd also found the apartment where the man was staying, and gotten pictures of the outside. "I also don't need you to tell me how to do it."

"I'm your handler," Newell spat, but _that_ made Clint round on him, eyes just barely blazing as his posture stiffened.

"You are _not_ my handler." he said coldly, stepping up closer to Newell and noting that the man's eyes flashed with something unreadable, but he didn't step back. "You are _his_ handler. You are both here to _shadow_ me. Are we clear on that?"

"I may not be assigned to you Barton, and this may be my first time running a distance operation, but I am still _acting_ as your handler, and I still know how eliminating a target works. If I say pull the trigger, you had better damn well do it." Newell returned, voice raising and practically oozing a demand for respect.

For a few moments, not a single muscle twitched in Clint's body. Then, his entire expression smoothed over into nothing, his eyes darkening with a cold, predatory deadliness that almost seemed to lower the temperature in the room by a few degrees.

"That is not how this works." he said, tone lowering in a stark contrast to Newell's raised voice. "Not with me, and not with him. I will not kill another human being just because someone else _tells me to_." at that point, Clint's voice was dripping with a just barely audible venom, and Newell seemed to swallow whatever it was he had been planning on saying next, jaw clenching stiffly. "If I kill someone, it will be because they pose a threat, or have done enough to warrant my attention. Mancilla is both those things, and I will put him down with extreme prejudice _when I see fit_. If you have an issue with that feel free to take a plane back to New York. Otherwise,"

Clint turned away from Newell easily, pulling his phone out of his pocket and reaching over to plug it in to the laptop set up on the table. Within a few moments, he had pulled up a slideshow of pictures, leaving them up as he shouldered into the kitchen.

"Feel free to have a look at Mancilla's local contact."

Silence rang through the safe house, dark and filled with tension. Flynn, for his part, stayed completely silent as he stood and moved around to look through the pictures Clint had gotten. Slowly, Newell followed his lead, scanning the images intently as he scrolled through them. Clint was content to ignore them both, grabbing a water out of the fridge and gulping down half of it, before he grabbed a container of leftover take-out from the night before.

"I'll uh..." Newell paused to clear his throat after starting, but Clint didn't twitch in response, not looking up or acknowledging him. "I'll get these pictures back to base; see if they can't identify this guy."

Clint snorted to himself, fighting not to roll his eyes. Sounded like the older agent was _almost_ admitting that he had been wrong. Shocking. Either way he chose to ignore it, and the man entirely, stepping out of the kitchen and speaking exclusively to Flynn, who met his gaze as soon as it was pointed towards him.

"Did you get any sleep since last night?" he asked, not wanting to send the kid out if he was exhausted as he himself was. Thankfully, Flynn just nodded.

"Yes sir. From when I got back to about two hours ago."

"Good. Get to Mancilla's apartment, find yourself a nice spot, and wait. Radio in as soon as he leaves." Clint instructed, and Flynn started to nod again, before he gave a small frown and asked a question.

"Do I follow him?"

At that, Clint hesitated. Flynn had little to no actual experience tailing a hostile like Mancilla. But he wasn't going to get any being coddled either.

"Carefully." he said eventually. "If at any point you feel he's going into an area that you think could give away your presence, I want you to double back and meet me at the docks, understood?"

"Yes sir." Flynn nodded, moving quickly to collect his side arm and get a good look at the 'X' that Clint had put on the map to mark the apartment.

Clint then walked straight by Newell without a word, toed of his boots as soon as he was in the other room, and all but collapsed onto his cot, eyes closing briefly as he allowed his exhaustion to ripple through him.

He jolted into wakefulness as soon as he felt a presence enter his immediate vicinity, eyes snapping open as he swung himself into a sitting position, gleaming blade already in hand. Newell had stopped a few feet away, eyeing his blade with a tiny bit of apprehension before he found the archer's gaze and spoke.

"Flynn just called in. Mancilla's on the move."

Clint didn't wait to hear anything else, sliding his feet back into his boots and slipping past Newell to exit the room. He stowed his knife as he went, picking up his quiver from where he'd left it on a chair and slinging it onto his back before reaching for his comm and slipping it into his ear.

"He said that Mancilla had a duffle with him, but it looked too empty to be all his belongings." Newell informed him, and Clint gave a short nod of understanding as he looked down to check his watch. He'd managed to sleep for six hours after tossing and turning on his cot for a few beforehand. Thank heaven for small miracles.

"Probably tools of his trade; he's most likely planning on making his move tonight. Not that he'll get that far." Clint gave a small wolfish smirk before he turned back to Newell as he paused at the door. "Keep on the comms, I'll radio in when I have my shot, and again once I've eliminated the target."

The way he spoke to the man said absolutely nothing of the argument they'd had before, and Newell certainly wasn't about to bring it up, instead just returning the short nod that the assassin had given him. Clint didn't wait for any more conformation than that, slipping out onto the darkened streets and into the shadows, heading towards the docks.

He got into the port without a ripple as he had for the past two nights, making his way up to the roof of the warehouse that had become his perch. Mancilla would likely come in the same way he had the night before, so from there he would know roughly the direction he needed to look in. Barely ten minutes after that he heard someone scaling the fire escape to his right and he flicked his gaze over just long enough to confirm Flynn's presence before they went back to the shadowed expanse of concrete below him.

"He's here." the young agent muttered the answer to the unasked question, and Clint didn't give a response other than to slip his bow out of the slot on the side of his quiver, and jerk it open.

The silence between the two of them was almost oppressive, but that wasn't at all Clint's focus. He zeroed in on the first sign of movement, watching with narrowed eyes as Mancilla slipped out from between the same two cargo containers as he had the night before and made a bee-line for the customs' house. He wasn't trying to be discrete, and he obviously held no concern for his surroundings. That was his mistake.

Clint pulled an arrow easily, nocking it and pulling it back into his bow with a single breath as he straightened his crouch and tracked the man's movements.

"Target sighted," he murmured, waiting a single beat just in case of any protest, before let out his breath, fixed his aim, and loosed his arrow.

There was a small sound of impact as the arrow imbedded itself into Mancilla's chest, before a much louder thud as the man crumpled to the ground, instantly dead. Clint watched for another beat, just to make completely sure that there wasn't a twitch of movement - not that one of his arrows had ever missed its mark - before he spoke into his comm again, standing fluidly and collapsing his bow.

"Target eliminated. Call the mission in as complete, Newell, we'll be back at the safe house in a few minutes."

_'Copy that, Hawkeye.'_ the handler's voice came back instantly, and Clint gave a small nod before he glanced around to Flynn. The younger agent had stayed in his crouch, still staring at Mancilla's body with an unreadable expression and a small frown.

Clint could see the conflict playing out in his eyes, and recognized it as the same he had experienced after his first kill, an Afghani man who had been about to turn an automatic weapon onto his unit. Having to reconcile the knowledge that what had been done had been with good intentions, and yet it had killed another human being. This may not have been Flynn's kill, but he had certainly helped facilitate it. After a few moments, Clint stepped closer to him and pulled him up by the shoulder, pulling his gaze away from Mancilla and meeting it.

"Don't think about him." he said firmly, nodding down to the body crumpled on the concrete. He turned Flynn by the shoulder and nodded to the customs' house. "Think about them, and what you saved them from."

It only took a moment for Flynn's expression to harden and for him to give a short nod. Clint returned it before stepping away, making his way back towards the fire escape.

"You did good, Flynn, I was impressed." he said lightly, landing in a crouch on the fire escape's railing before leaping down the rest of the way. "Now let's get home."

* * *

Clint let out a long breath as he stepped out of the SHIELD SUV that had dropped him off in front of Stark's tower. The flight had been long and awkward between him and Newell, but Clint hadn't really paid it any mind, more interested in trying to stave off what threatened to be soul-crushing boredom. He'd ended up spending the majority of the flight teaching Flynn the basics of Mandarin. But, even the flight itself had ended almost four hours ago, being followed up by an extensive debrief, as well as seeing what a team of agents had been able to uncover about the identity of the man that Clint had observed Mancilla having contact with. Suffice it to say he and his ties were being heavily investigated.

In all honesty, he was just glad to be home. As odd as the thought was, he was starting to come to terms with it, not immediately berating himself internally for the use of the word anymore. The tower _was_ his home. The little pessimistic part of his brain felt the need to add '_at least for now' _at the end of that statement, but that could be ignored.

He stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the team's main floor, unsurprised when JARVIS' voice followed the elevator's movement.

_'Welcome home, Agent Barton.' _the AI greeted smoothly. _'Would you like me to inform the others of your return?'_

"Sure JARVIS." Clint said with a slight grin, still amazed how Tony Stark could have programmed something so eternally polite. "Nothing explode while I was gone?"

_'No sir. Everything was as calm as Mr. Stark and Mr. Odinson in the same room could possibly be.'_

Clint's grin widened at that announcement, giving a slight shake of his head. And then there was that.

When he stepped off the elevator, Natasha was there to greet him with a twitch of a smirk. He returned it, not protesting when she transitioned his duffle from his shoulder to hers without so much as a ripple and started forward towards his room. He made to follow her, but she just held out a hand to stop him, grin turned mischievous.

"Wait here." she instructed, and Clint arched an eyebrow but rocked back on his heels to do so, crossing his arms over his chest and waiting.

She returned in less than a minute, just having set down his bag, and he spoke as soon as she had snapped his door shut behind her.

"What, I get home and I'm not even allowed to go into my own room?" he asked sarcastically, and she just gave a slight roll of her eyes and a more obvious knowing grin.

"Clint, what's today's date?" she asked pointedly, and his eyebrow arched higher with the question.

"In what time zone? I've been in almost all of them today." he returned and she punched him lightly in the arm with an exasperated sigh.

"It's the 20th. Of March." she supplied helpfully, and for a few moments Clint's confusion ran rampant, before it ran into a brick wall of realization, and his eyes widened slightly as his arms fell to his sides.

"Oh." he responded simply, trying a small, almost sheepish smirk. The fact that it was the 20th was significant in that it meant the 18th had been two days ago. And it had been his birthday. He had been twenty-six for two days without realizing it.

Then again, it wasn't that shocking, seeing as he had spent most of his life without the day holding any real significance. But somehow he doubted that would hold true with his five occasionally over-exuberant team mates around.

"They disappointed I wasn't here?" he asked, and Natasha rolled her eyes again, her expression now affectionate.

"A little." she confirmed, before continuing with a raised eyebrow and a slight head tilt. "Tony especially seems to be channeling it to Fury though. The rest of them have been waiting like pent up balls of excitement for you to get home." she said before meeting his gaze consideringly. "Have you ever experienced Thor as a pent up ball of excitement?"

Clint gave a snort of laughter at that mental image, now more amazed that nothing had exploded in his absence.

"They didn't go overboard, did they?" he asked, the tiniest bit of joking caution in his tone.

"Let's just say they've been planning this for weeks now." Natasha said coolly, before grinning and pulling him back into the elevator. "You shouldn't be surprised. This is them."

"But they didn't have to-" Clint started, only to have her cut him off with a small, quick kiss as the elevator doors slid shut.

"Give them this." she told him, her grin softening. He held her gaze for a few moments before the corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk and he gave a small nod of concession. Then he ducked his head to kiss her again, feeling her hand come up to rest on the side of his neck.

They only pulled apart when the elevator doors opened up to the top floor of the tower, revealing the rest of their team mates, and Pepper, crowded a few feet away. Clint grinned when he saw them, which was instantly returned from all five faces. He quickly noted the almost shrewd edge to Bruce's expression and turned to face him with a roll of his eyes, already knowing the reason behind it.

"Not a scratch, doc, I swear." he assured, and Bruce raised his hands in surrender and relaxed.

"Well that's good. Then again, if anyone was going to be unlucky enough to get shot or something on their birthday, it'd be you, Featherhead." Tony pointed out making Clint shoot a slight glare at him, though he didn't look at all repentant as he continued. "What? You have an alarming propensity for injury. You can't pin _that_ on me."

"Happy birthday, Clint." Steve cut in with an exasperated grin, clapping a hand down on the archer's shoulder, only to give a slight sigh when Tony interjected quickly.

"Late. Late birthday. Because old Nick had him off doing super-spy stuff when he should have been celebrating and getting drunk and doing all kinds of fun stuff." the billionaire sounded remarkably indignant on Clint's behalf, which the archer found more amusing than anything else.

"You think Fury cares when my birthday is?" he asked with a slightly raised eyebrow, but Tony just scoffed, and moved over to a table near the couches.

"Whatever, we have food. And cake. And presents." he said dismissively.

"You guys didn't have to," he started, almost thankful when Thor cut him off. What was he supposed to say? That they hadn't had to go through the trouble of planning something for his birthday, or getting him anything, or basically acknowledging what not many people other than Phil or Natasha had since he was six? Yeah, that wasn't a buzz-killer or anything.

"My friend, it was no trouble." Thor said with a wide grin, before taking advantage of being one of the few people Clint would allow a bone-crushing hug from. "We are all thrilled to participate in the celebration of the day of your birth."

The rest of his night served to allow him plenty of opportunity to decompress from his mission in the mostly relaxing company of his friends. He said mostly because evidently somewhere along the line Tony had thought it would be funny to start an M&M war, pegging them at everyone else to entice them into joining in. It worked, M&Ms were littered everywhere across the floor, and they had taken refuge behind various pieces of furniture with handfuls of candy all at some stage of melting. It had ended when Natasha had gotten fed up, stalked over to Tony despite the feeble barrage of chocolate, and reminded him just how many ways she could kill him with an M&M.

They had settled quickly after that, cleaning up their mess, and Clint had no sooner sat down than he was presented with a large, sleek, black backpack from Tony.

"Your bow and quiver fit inside." the billionaire explained lightly as he plopped down beside Clint on the couch. "So you can carry them around without being quite as conspicuous if you need to. The top has a quick release snap if you need to get in there quickly. And it might have a comm with a direct connection to JARVIS."

Clint eyed it with an obvious air of appreciation, knowing how useful it would be to have the option of carrying his quiver without drawing the attention and suspicion of others. The connection with JARVIS was just Tony's round-about way of making sure there would always be a way for him to get help if he needed it.

"Thanks Tony." he said, glancing to the billionaire and giving a nod and a grin that was returned quickly and sincerely before Tony was looking away quickly and turning his attention to where Bruce leaned forward where he sat on the couch across from him.

"Steve, Natasha and I have known for a while now about your little habit of borrowing from our bookshelves and putting them back before you think we'll notice." the doctor started, tone amused, and Clint had the decency to look a little sheepish. He enjoyed a good book when he was bored, but he hadn't thought anyone but Natasha had known about that. At least if Bruce and Steve were amused, they weren't angry about it. "Despite that, you never seem to actually take yourself to a bookstore, so we took the liberty for you. There's a bookshelf in your room now. I think we filled what, three shelves?" Bruce asked, looking over to where Steve and then Natasha sat, both wearing grins.

"Something like that." Steve said lightly, and Clint felt his expression brighten slightly as his eyes sparked at the thought of so much more reading material at his disposal. That was his. He wasn't worried at all over their choices; Natasha knew what he preferred in books.

"That sounds awesome." he said honestly, and Bruce and Steve's smiles brightened as Natasha leaned slightly into his side. "Thanks guys."

"I just hope you enjoy them." Bruce said before looking to Thor who was waiting with what looked to be poorly controlled excitement for his turn.

When the demi-god held what looked like a knife in a leather sheath out to him he straightened slightly before reaching forward to accept the weapon with open curiosity. Once it was in his hand, there was no doubt that the sheath may indeed be made of some form of leather, it certainly wasn't cow. Or anything else he'd seen before.

"I know you already have many a fine blade, my friend, but I saw this on my last trip to Asgard and could think of no one that it would fit better." Thor explained smiling before giving him a slight nod.

Still slightly awed by the fact that he was being given an Asgardian weapon, Clint considered the hilt, noting that it looked somewhat like the hilt of Mjolnir, covered with a darker leather and wrapped with thin strips of a lighter color. He gripped it lightly before pulling it out of the sheath, and had to immediately stop all mentions of the word 'knife' in his mind. Because what Thor had just given him constituted as no less than an eight inch, double-edged short sword. He felt his eyes widen because the weapon was legitimately beautiful. It gleamed in the light, looking sharp enough to leave a paper cut with the lightest touch. The blade itself looked to be made of some kind of cross of copper and silver with the coloring, but considering it was Asgardian, it was probably made with some metal he had never even heard of. It was almost feather-light when he twirled it experimentally in one hand, and didn't so much as waver a fraction of an inch when he tested the balance by holding it on a fingertip placed at the joint of blade and hilt.

"Thor, this is amazing." he said, still amazed, and heard Thor give a chuckle in response.

"Indeed, it is a fine weapon, and I know you will put it to good use. It will not dull or rust as some Midgardian ones are prone to." the blonde Asgardian told him, and Clint gave a quiet huff of disbelief but slipped the blade back into its sheath.

"Thanks."

When Clint finally returned to his room hours later, he heard himself give a small groan as he opened the door.

As Bruce had told him, there was a new black wooden bookshelf in the far right corner of his room facing his bed, three shelves packed with all manner of books. But there were also purple and black streamers hanging from every single viable surface of his room, making his ceiling look like some demented canopy, though he did note there was a space left thoughtfully beneath the air vent.

"You guys seriously did _not _T-P my room with streamers." he said, turning back around to see that everyone else had paused a few feet away, grinning at him without a speck of remorse.

"We so totally did." Tony returned smugly, and Clint had to turn back around to hide the fond grin he gave before he could help it.

"If you do it again, I will not hesitate to take your heart out with a spoon." he muttered to more or less save face, and no one took him seriously, laughing in response.

* * *

It was only four days later that Steve approached Clint at breakfast, looking solemn and worried almost, which instantly made Clint frown and straighten.

"Hey," he started, stiffening himself somewhat. "Would you come with me to SHIELD? The director wants your input on something." the Captain said, though he didn't sound pleased, and the archer shifted, immediately understanding what was going on.

"The HYDRA thing?" he asked shortly, and Steve nodded. As soon as he did, Clint stood, expression hardened. "Of course."

Within half an hour, they had arrived at the base and found themselves in a briefing room with Fury and a pair of intelligence agents that Clint wasn't familiar with.

"Agent Barton, Captain Rogers told me he told you the basics of what's been going on." Fury started as soon as the door slid shut behind them, and Clint looked to him and gave a nod.

"Yes sir, the very basics." he confirmed, and Fury nodded and pulled out a file, handing it to him.

"There's some new information that's come to light."

As it turned out, that new information was the fact that HYDRA's leaders were putting feelers out, not for Cap, but for him. Clint listened to the briefing with narrowed eyes, understanding exactly what Fury was going to want before he even finished. HYDRA knew that he had been involved with the Avengers in the Battle of New York, but considering that Clint had some vaguely supernatural ability to keep himself out of the press and most of the news reels of other battles, intel said HYDRA didn't think he was a permanent fixture within the team. They had taken every body that could be tied to him since the battle, and assumed he was still taking contracts. Which meant they thought that with enough financial incentive, he'd be willing to provide them with information.

"I don't like it." Cap said, standing at the back of the room with his arms crossed across his chest, as soon as Fury finished. "There's too big of a risk that it's just a trap to lure Clint in to get to me."

"The intel is sound, Captain." Fury countered firmly, with a tone Clint knew to mean that they'd been over it a few times already. "We have no reason to believe that HYDRA is putting out false information, and any gathered by Hawkeye would further our own operations ten-fold. The Council has put their two cents in as well. They want Barton on this."

"But the risk," Steve started, only to be cut off by Clint, speaking up for the first time.

"Is outweighed by the benefit." he said firmly, and Steve's eyes snapped to him, some of the anger simmering into worry. "Cap, this is me. I'll be fine, even if things do turn sour. This isn't anything I haven't seen before. Besides," he flicked his gaze to Fury, who straightened somewhat. "I could probably manipulate them into keeping me around for more than information."

"So you can what, assassinate people for them?" Steve demanded, and Clint straightened, turning to narrow his eyes at the Captain.

"No. There's more ways than one that I can be a valuable asset, and it looks like they've done enough of their homework to recognize that." Clint said coolly, and Cap sighed.

"These people are dangerous."

"So am I."

And that's how, a little less than a week later, Clint found himself walking into a small cafe in Prague that was nearly empty. In fact there was only one occupied table. A single man sat at a booth in the back that was flanked on either side by an armed man. Both stiffened as Clint entered and approached, but the archer didn't look concerned in the slightest, stride confident and gaze cold and deadly.

**"This place is not open to the public. Leave." **one of the men ordered, but Clint paid him no heed, pausing as he came within a few feet of them.

**"I want to talk to the boss, not the grunt." **Clint returned dismissively, German sliding effortlessly as he raised a single, dangerous eyebrow when both men pulled pistols and trained them at him. The man seated at the table looked interested but unconcerned, watching silently. **"Put those away before you hurt yourselves."**

One of the men stepped forward as if to herd him away from the table, and Clint raised a hand in surrender and started to turn away, only to spin back around, grab the man by the wrist, and twist his arm enough to both disarm him and dislocate his shoulder. Before the breath for the cry could fully leave him, Clint had followed up with a sharp punch to the temple that snapped his head back and made him crumple bonelessly to the ground. In the next moment, he had spun and brought up his right leg, kicking the wrist of the second man to disarm him as well. Clint's next sequence of movements left him motionless on the ground like his companion, and Clint's expression didn't so much as flicker as he then brushed off his shirt and slid into the other side of the booth, across from the older man, who was now openly curious.

**"Mr. Fleischer." **he greeted smoothly, not an ounce of emotion in his tone. **"I believe you've been looking to speak with me."**

* * *

**Ooh, look! Stuff's starting to happen, fantastic! And it was longer than usual!  
I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and that you'll leave a review if you have any comments or questions you'd like to throw at me. I'd be more than thrilled to catch them. *grins*  
Until later this week,  
~Dogstar**


	5. Chapter 5

**Here we are, back for the next chapter as promised. Thanks to everyone that has read, reviewed, alerted and favorited this story!**

**Just as a heads up, the next update will be Tuesday instead of Monday, as I have midterms I have to do and won't be able to get on to post. But, I hope you enjoy this chapter, and feel free to leave me a review with any comments or questions you may have. Bolded dialogue in the story is meant to be German.**

_**As Always, I Own Nothing.**_

* * *

For a moment, the man seated across from Clint at the booth was silent, appraising both him and the two unconscious men on the floor. Then, however, he shook his head in amazement and laughed. Clint allowed one corner of his mouth to twitch in the barest of smirks, though his eyes remained cold and dangerous. From SHIELD's intel this man, - Fleischer, was the leader of the HYDRA sect, or at the very least, of the operations in Prague. He was the man looking to pay him for information. Getting his location hadn't been easy, Clint having been scouting for a few days to have enough information to keep from walking into this meeting blind. But, he was here now, playing the part of the contract assassin he hadn't been for almost nine years with a hidden comm in his ear that transmitted everything he heard to SHIELD.

"Oh, Hawkeye, your reputation certainly precedes you." Fleischer said with a chuckle, nodding to his downed men. He transitioned from German to heavily accented English easily. "If I had known you were coming to see me I would have told my men how unwise it is to challenge such an adversary."

"No one ever knows when I'm coming to see them Mr. Fleischer." Clint said just as lightly, before his smirk widened into something that was distinctly more predatory. "It's... part of my charm."

"Of course, of course." the older man waved him off before settling slightly and gesturing to his own plate that lay half-eaten in front of him. "Could I get you anything? I wouldn't have you thinking that I'm not a good host."

"Thank you, but no." Clint said, before straightening and narrowing his eyes slightly. "Why am I here?"

He knew the answer to that already of course, but Fleischer couldn't know that he knew. He also couldn't know that Cap was sitting on the other end of his comm, listening to every word he was saying.

"Why are you usually, anywhere, Hawk?" Fleischer asked curiously, but Clint just snorted, raising an eyebrow.

"Your organization isn't usually one to use a man like me for such blatant dirty work." he pointed out, arching his eyebrow further at the man's impressed expression. "You think I don't do my homework on potential employers? That's bad for business, Mr. Fleischer."

"Forgive me." he raised one hand in appeasement before grinning. "But if you know my organization as well as you claim, you should already know what I could possibly want from you."

Clint shrugged a small nod to that, not playing completely stupid. Even if he hadn't had SHIELD's intel, that would be a correlation he would be able to make. This is where he would have to be careful though, dancing the line between knowing enough but not too much about Steve to satisfy what Fleischer would think him capable of knowing.

"I have a guess, not much else." he said, and Fleischer nodded, pushing his plate aside and leaning forward slightly.

"I know you have had contact with Captain America, primarily in New York about a year ago now." he started, tone light as he considered Clint carefully, which made the archer straighten slightly. "As you could imagine, the Captain is of particular interest to me and my organization. My other attempts to gather information have yielded pitifully little results, but you are a reasonable man, aren't you Hawk?"

"I have to warn you, Mr. Fleischer, my time and my knowledge don't come cheap." Clint said, still keeping his tone light while wondering just what the man had meant by 'other attempts'. SHIELD hadn't been aware of this HYDRA sect having been responsible for anything else concerning Steve.

"Of course they don't, I would expect nothing less from a man of your caliber. Though I hope," Fleischer paused as he reached into a pocket, which had Clint stiffening slightly, until he saw the man simply bringing out a checkbook and a pen. "That this would be enough to earn me an hour or two of polite conversation."

When Fleischer ripped the newly filled out check out of the book and slid it across the table to him, Clint couldn't help raising an eyebrow at the amount he was being offered. HYDRA _really_ wanted Steve, if this was any indication. The man seemed willing to wait patiently for Clint to decline or accept his offer, and Clint gave a quiet snort as he reached forward after a few moments, picking up the check, folding it in half, and sliding it into a pocket of his jacket.

"Typically when paid with a check I wait for it to clear before rendering my services, but you're a reasonably intelligent man, aren't you Mr. Fleischer?" Clint raised an eyebrow in clear question, and the older man raised one hand once again, expression calm and knowing.

"Rest assured, Hawk, I am well aware of the... _consequences_ of deceiving you. I have no such wish to suddenly end up on the pointy end of one of your arrows." Fleischer said and Clint gave a dark smirk and a small nod, inviting the man to continue. "I was wondering how a man such as you got involved with the events in New York?"

"I thought you were paying me for information on the Captain." Clint said, leaning back slightly in his bench, and Fleischer grinned.

"A simple curiosity, I assure you."

"Wrong place, wrong time, really. The Black Widow contacted me, and I owed her a debt. If I had known the extent of what I was agreeing to fight I would have been far less agreeable." Clint said simply, and Fleischer gave an understanding nod to that, before continuing.

"Have you had any further contact with the Captain since then?"

"Here and there. The Widow has the uncanny habit of knowing when I'm in the area of the Avengers' exploits. She can be a... very convincing woman."

"Oh I'm sure." the older man's eyes flashed in amusement, and Clint knew that he was buying what he was selling. Even so, he didn't relax in any way, and kept his focus outward, in case of any more of Fleischer's men that could come up on him. "My main interests in Captain America lie in his abilities. And how he survived the plane crash and resulting 70 years trapped in ice when HYDRA's own leader did not."

"The second one, I couldn't tell you." Clint said easily, giving a snort. "The Captain and I don't exactly see eye to eye on many things, and I'm not of the opinion that he trusts me much more than he would you. We haven't really had deep, personal conversations between the two of us."

"I could see how _Captain America_ would be less than accepting of a contract assassin." Fleischer agreed thoughtfully, before his gaze turned intense. "But you can tell me about the extent of his abilities?"

"That I can do." Clint agreed, before continuing matter of factly. He gave Fleischer mostly truthful information, about Steve's strength and his fighting style, things that he would have picked up on first off, had he been an outsider, which he had been. He touched on Steve's healing abilities and his mind for strategy, but he didn't go into detail, and he completely left out the super soldier's ability to metabolize virtually any drug in a matter of minutes. There were things that Fleischer just did not need to know, as far as he was concerned, despite the fact that Fury and Steve had green-lighted him to tell the man anything and everything if he thought it would further the mission.

Thankfully, the man seemed more than content with what he was being given, looking almost giddy with excitement. He went so far as to send his men out of the room when they groggily regained consciousness.

"You prove most helpful, Hawk." Fleischer said after he had finished, and Clint gave a small nod. "Can you tell me what his relationship is like with the other Avengers?"

"He and Stark are constantly at each other's throats, it seems like." Clint deadpanned, before he gave a shrug. The only reason he could think of for why Fleischer would want that particular information, would be to see if there would be any way to draw Cap out with his team mates. And he couldn't stand by and give the man what he needed to hear to try something like that. "Honestly, the whole group is a train wreck. No one's listening to no one. If I had to say who the Captain seemed closest to, it'd have to be the big guy, Thor. Kindred spirits or something like that."

Now, he'd love to sell tickets and watch HYDRA try to take down Thor to get to Steve.

"I can't help but agree with your first statement. Mr. Stark proved most unhelpful in this case." Fleischer said dismissively, but Clint fought not to freeze or show his shock, instead keeping his expression and tone carefully neutral.

"You got to Tony Stark?" he asked, forcing an impressed tone that had the older man giving a sigh.

"It was time poorly spent. One of our off-shoot organizations in Nevada tried to question him months ago, and let's just say it ended... badly for those involved. As far as we could tell, this _Thor_ destroyed the compound and everyone in it." Fleischer said, tone suggesting the whole situation still left a bad taste in his mouth. Clint, on the other hand, was fighting harder than ever to keep himself calm.

It had been HYDRA, this man in front of him, that had been responsible for Tony's torture in Nevada. The torture that still obviously haunted the billionaire from time to time. And then, it hadn't been Thor who had dealt the final blow to the compound and killed the remaining men. It had been him; one of his explosive arrows. It made sense that Fleischer had drawn the conclusion to Thor, however, seeing as there had been extensive damage from lightning.

"I heard them talking about that once, it was a while ago, wasn't it?" he asked curiously, and the man gave a nod.

"Yes, but thankfully, you have provided what he refused to." Fleischer said, before looking back to Clint with an almost considering expression. That, at least, was an expression Clint recognized, one he had been hoping for even.

"There something else you wanted from me?" he asked, and Fleischer gave a small nod, leaning forward again.

"To be honest, Hawk, I could use a man like you. I have done my research as well, as you could imagine. I need an unbiased eye, and from what I've gathered, killing is not your only talent." the man said lightly, and Clint couldn't see or hear any deception in his eyes or tone. Even so, he knew he'd have to tread carefully, but he was prepared for that. "I can make it worth your while."

Clint gave a smirk and patted his jacket pocket where he'd put the man's first check.

"I'm sure of that." he said coolly, before his eyes narrowed slightly. "I hope you realize that just because I'm willing to take your money, it doesn't mean that I necessarily agree with you or your organization's views."

"That's what I'm counting on." Fleischer said simply, and to that, Clint could only shrug a nod.

* * *

Within twenty-four hours, he had collected his duffle and had joined Fleischer in driving out to HYDRA's compound, a little less than twenty miles from the city. The man's guards had been more than a little disgruntled by his presence, but Clint hadn't paid them any mind, keeping his expression blank and cold. He already knew that this wasn't going to be easy, and he'd probably see things that would make him want to blow his cover. And that wasn't an option. As far as SHIELD was concerned, HYDRA was the biggest non-alien fish there was. There wasn't any room for error on this mission, no matter what ended up being required of him.

For two weeks, he more or less acted as Fleischer's advisor. Somehow, the man had grown to trust him, or at least the sum of money he'd paid for the archer's loyalty, and Clint was practically swimming in information that he was sure other SHIELD agents had died trying to get their hands on. He really, really hoped that Fury had set someone to record what came through his comm 24/7 to get the new intel where it needed to go. He was seeing weapons that were being designed, plans for attacks that were being made, who HYDRA had contact with on an international scale, and a whole slew of other things.

What he didn't know, though, was how long he was expected to stay with this cover. He'd only been in actual contact with SHIELD once since the mission had started, and that was to simply inform them that Fleischer had taken the bait and that he was being brought in. All he could do at this point was keep gathering as much information as he could and wait for orders.

And then, as was prone to happen on his missions, shit hit the fan in one of the most spectacular ways Clint would have believed possible.

He was sitting at a table in one of HYDRA's underground bunkers, cleaning a pistol and waiting. Fleischer had said he was coming to meet him, but why the man had told him to wait in the bunker that housed currently unoccupied cells for prisoners he wasn't quite sure. He was uneasy, he knew something wasn't right, and as soon as he heard a loud commotion coming towards the bunker from the hallway, his head snapped up and he watched the doorway warily. The shouting, and the unease, made a lot more sense when an all too familiar man was shoved through the doorway, barely stumbling before he spun back around to face the swarm of men that followed him through. Clint could see iron chain about as thick as the barrel on his pistol wound tightly around the man's wrists, but even still he faced the HYDRA lackies straight-backed and defiant.

And from where Clint was sitting, his table pushed into the corner of the bunker to the right of the door, he could tell that Fleischer's men were rightfully too cautious to get within range for their prisoner to attack. Seemingly ignorant of the danger he was putting his men in, Fleischer walked into the bunker after them, the grin on his face far too malicious to bring Clint any comfort.

**"Hawkeye, would you mind assisting with our new arrival?"** Fleischer asked, a note of triumph easily discernible in his voice. Clint just arched an eyebrow at him, glancing over his shoulder at the standoff taking place on the other side of the bunker.

**"You think you're paying me enough to help you keep Captain America captive?"** he demanded, falling into German easily as he had the entire time he'd been at the compound and more or less stalling for time, because _he didn't know what to do_. He did know that Fleischer's hate ran deep enough that the man would pay him absolutely anything to ensure that Steve stayed in his hands, but he had to do something to give himself time to think. **"Do you think I have a death wish?"**

Fleischer scowled at him, but Clint didn't really care, keeping a majority of his attention on what was going on between Steve and the other men. They had clearly been instructed to keep their guns put away, which meant Fleischer didn't want Steve dead yet, but because of that, they were having one hell of a time controlling the super soldier.

**"I believe that is something we could easily rectify later."** the older man said pointedly, and Clint hid a sigh as he stood and slid the final piece of his gun back into place.

He knew there was nothing he could do for Steve now. Not until he figured out exactly what had happened and what SHIELD expected him to do about it. So he would play along, keep his cover, and do his best to keep Steve from getting hurt for as long as he could. Keeping his expression blank, he shouldered through the group of men that surrounded Steve and felt his team mate's gaze land on him immediately. Clint returned the heated gaze, easily seeing in Cap's eyes that something downright _ugly _had happened, and that the men had already tried and failed to drug him into unconsciousness at least a few times. There was still a slight bit of dullness to his eyes, but he should be lucid enough to recognize the little act they had to put on.

So, as he stopped, he leveled his pistol between Steve's eyes and didn't so much as blink as he spoke coolly.

"Captain, you and I are both well aware of the fact that I'm not known for missing."

Steve stiffened and glared at him, allowing the slightest bit of understanding to flash in his eyes before he spoke as well, not letting his gaze waver to anyone else in the room.

"Forgive me for not being so surprised that these are the kinds of people you associate with." Steve growled, and Clint gave a mental nod to himself, knowing from that that Steve had been listening that first day when he had given the story about their lack of relationship to Fleischer. Small miracles.

"Whoever pays the best, Cap." Clint said simply with a shrug before his eyes narrowed. "We both know how this is going to end. No sense in fighting it."

Steve started to open his mouth to give some heated response, but the sound of a scuffle near the door had him looking up and behind Clint to the source. Clint took the opportunity of his distraction, stowed his gun, and jumped up to grab one of the pipes that transected the bunker's ceiling, swinging his body gracefully at Steve.

In the next moment, he had forced the super soldier to the ground on his stomach, one leg wrapped around his throat and the other braced against his shoulder blades. One jerk in any direction and Steve's neck was broken, but Clint well knew how to avoid that as he looked up to Fleischer's men with a scowl.

**"If you want to restrain him, I suggest doing it now."** he said lowly, and the men jumped into action, approaching quickly with more lengths of chain.

As the men made sure that Steve would no longer be a threat, Clint glanced up to the doorway to see for himself what had caused the scuffle, and felt his eyes narrow when he saw another man holding a bound and struggling SHIELD agent. It was at that point he was more or less sure that fate hated him.

When Fleischer's men were done with Steve, having added chains to his ankles and around his arms to keep them pinned to his body, Clint gracefully extracted himself and stood, watching as the men dragged Steve's silent and glaring form into one of the cells before he turned back to where Fleischer stood with the SHIELD agent and tipped his chin up.

"Who's this?" he demanded, and he felt the agent's gaze shoot to him, and he prayed that the man had the sense to keep his mouth shut as Fleischer responded.

"It seems that the good Captain has been lending his skills to SHIELD. I trust you know who they are." the older man said and Clint gave a snort, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Enough to know that they're a pain in my ass. What do you want him for?"

"I don't. He _was_ collateral against Captain Rogers, but seeing as we have him secured, I have no use for him." Fleischer said coldly, and the agent's eyes widened slightly but he didn't speak. Clint's eyes narrowed as he internally froze. He couldn't just let them kill the agent.

"Well then, if you don't mind, there are some words I'd like to have with him. His friends have been trying to track my movements lately, and I'd like to see if I could find out why." Clint said, tone low and predatory as he kept his dark gaze locked on the agent. Fleischer gave a dark chuckle but waved him forward, speaking as Clint stepped forward and spun the agent by the shoulder, wrapping a dagger around to rest against his throat to keep him from struggling.

"I'm certainly not going to stop you, Hawk. There is a field a mile northeast of the gates where you can dispose of the body." Fleischer said, and Clint gave a nod.

That had been what he had been counting on. He knew about the field, and if he could just get the agent outside the gates without arousing suspicion, he could pretend he'd killed him and get him out of here. While leaving Steve alone in HYDRA's hands didn't appeal to him at all, Fleischer didn't want him dead immediately. That wasn't true for the agent.

"We'll have a nice talk on the way out there." Clint all but purred darkly before urging the agent forward, out of the bunker. As they passed the guard that had been holding him before, Clint slipped his hand unnoticed into the man's pocket and grabbed the phone that he could see just barely sticking out, sliding it into his own jacket before anyone could notice.

"I won't tell you anything." the agent said stubbornly as they left the bunker, and Clint couldn't tell if he was just saying it to make it more believable, or if he honestly didn't recognize him and believed he was going to torture him for information. Either way, Clint just gave a low, dark chuckle, eyes flashing.

"That's what you say now." he said coldly, before looking over his shoulder to Fleischer. "And when I get back, we _will _be negotiating my involvement with him." he jerked his head in the general direction of the cell that the men had dragged Steve into. Fleischer just nodded, and Clint returned it sharply before he continued pushing the agent forward.

They were both silent as Clint kept his dagger pressed unwaveringly into the agent's throat, taking him through the maze of underground bunkers before outside and towards the gate. The guards flanking the gate didn't give him a second thought, mostly because all of Fleischer's men knew by this point that if they tried to stop him from doing something they ended up unconscious on the ground with something broken. Outside the gate, Clint started in the direction towards the field, slipping into the thick forest that surrounded HYDRA's compound. He didn't relax, even as the fence and gate faded from sight. He knew HYDRA's surveillance went a quarter mile into the trees, farther near the road coming in, so he was sure to avoid that area and still seem like he was going towards the field he had been directed to.

When he was comfortable with how far they'd gone, and that there wasn't anyone at all nearby, Clint stopped, pulled his knife away from the agent's throat and stepped around him to meet his gaze.

"You know who I am, don't you?" he asked, and the agent gave a quick nod, the smallest flicker of hope forming on his face.

"You're Hawkeye."

"So you know that I'm not going to hurt you and you're not going to do anything stupid when I uncuff you." Clint prompted and the agent nodded again, which Clint returned, before he quickly picked the lock on both cuffs, releasing his wrists. "What's your name?"

"Johnson."

"What the hell happened?" Clint demanded next, and the agent sucked in a breath, shaking his head.

"We were ambushed. Captain Rogers was leading my team; we were searching the base of a suspected HYDRA offshoot in France. The rest of the team was killed." Johnson informed him shortly, and Clint let out a long breath, running a hand down his face.

"Are you hurt?" he asked next, feeling a minor pang of relief when the agent gave a small shrug before shaking his head.

"A bullet graze to my side, but it's not life threatening." he said, and Clint nodded, passing him the phone he'd lifted off the guard.

"Alright, get out of here, get back to the city, about twenty miles south of here, and call in for an extraction. They already know what happened." he tapped his ear for emphasis, and Johnson nodded, but paused with a frown before taking off.

"What about Captain Rogers?"

"Leave him to me." Clint said firmly, and the agent didn't argue with him, slipping off in a direction that would allow him to skirt the compound and not get recaptured. Once he was out of sight, Clint let out a long breath and spoke into his comm, knowing he had some time before Fleischer would expect him back. "SHIELD base, this is Hawkeye, requesting to be patched through to Director Fury."

_'Hawkeye, this is SHIELD base. Confirm that you are in a secure location.'_ a voice came back within moments, and Clint rolled his eyes but answered.

"Confirmed."

_'We've requested Director Fury to join this frequency, he should be on in a few moments.'_ the voice responded, and Clint gave a huffed breath, leaning back against the trunk of a wide tree.

_'I'm here, Barton.' _Fury's voice joined in within the minute, and Clint straightened as he responded.

"I trust you've been made aware of recent developments?" the archer asked, and Fury gave a grunt of agreement. "I got Johnson out, he's making his way back to Prague on foot, and he's got a cell phone with him. What do you want me to do about Cap?"

_'Has your cover been compromised?' _Fury asked, a heavy note to his voice that Clint wasn't sure he liked.

"No sir, but," Clint started, only to have the director cut him off.

_'Then you know the answer to that question.'_

Clint froze, mouth falling open slightly in shock.

"You want me to stay in? To watch them torture him?" he demanded lowly, and Fury sighed, but didn't move to correct him. "You can't be serious, Director."

_'You know protocol, Agent Barton. Especially with something as big as HYDRA, you are not to compromise yourself to assist Captain Rogers.' _Fury said shortly, and Clint felt his fists clench at his sides, warring with himself. Fury knew him well enough to take his silence for what it was and he sighed. _'I'll talk to the Council, but I'm not promising anything.'_

_ "_They're going to kill him, sir." Clint said shortly, eyes blazing. "Maybe not yet, but they will. You expect me to think that Steve's life is worth the information I'm getting? He's already sacrificed that once against these bastards."

_'I expect you to follow orders.' _Fury growled. _'And right now, those orders are to remain with your mission. Am I understood, Agent Barton?'_

For a long time, Clint was silent. Was it anyone else, and he could have answered without a problem. But it was Steve, and that made the decision a thousand times harder. In the end, though, he knew Steve could last at least the time it would take for Fury to get into contact with the Council. He would make sure to keep himself close, and do everything he could without compromising himself.

"Let me know the minute you talk to the Council." Clint said shortly, pushing down on the guilt he was already feeling. It was only going to get worse, and he could not allow himself to show it.

_'Barton, the Council isn't going to-' _Fury started, some unreadable emotion in his voice. Clint just cut him off, already knowing what he was going to say. The Council wouldn't pull him off HYDRA for one man. But Steve wasn't just any man.

"Then you need to remind them who Steve is, and what he's already sacrificed." Clint said pointedly before closing his eyes and resting his head back against the trunk of the tree he was leaning against.

* * *

**And there we have it. Poor Steve.  
Anyway, feel free to tell me what you think in a review, and I'll be seeing you again Tuesday.  
~Dogstar**


	6. Chapter 6

**And here we are, back for chapter 6! A big thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed to, alerted or favorited this story. Your support is very much appreciated.  
****Fair warning, this chapter is a bit of a doozie in the forms of both emotional and physical pain for everyone involved, and I'm well aware that some of you are probably going to hate me for doing this to poor Clint and Steve. I have no regrets. :)  
****At any rate, I hope you all enjoy the chapter, and feel free to leave me any questions or comments in a review.**

_**As Always, I Own Nothing.**_

* * *

As it turned out, Fleischer was willing to pay him quite a bit more to ensure his loyalty in dealing with Steve. The man's line of thinking was that not only was Clint the one that knew the Captain and his abilities the best, and not only was he the only one in the compound that even had a hope of being able to subdue him, but that Steve would hesitate before hurting a man he had fought beside, even with a threat to himself. The sickening fact was, Clint knew he was probably right, on all counts. Even if the only relation between the two of them was the story that he had given to HYDRA, Steve would think twice before attacking someone who had once been his ally. And while the archer _hated_ that Fleischer could have such strong reasoning to keep him involved in Steve's torture, he couldn't help being relieved by it.

If he was close, he could keep an eye on things. Maybe that was the only thing he could do at the moment, with his orders the way they were, but he already knew that it wasn't going to be easy.

As he walked into the cell that Steve had been dragged into, he forced the swirling vortex of thoughts and emotions back, locking down his expression and keeping it perfectly blank. Behind him, Fleischer gave a low chuckle as he followed him in and closed the door behind himself.

"Well, well. _Captain America_." the HYDRA leader sneered, walking over to where Steve kneeled, the chains from both his wrists and ankles secured to the back wall of the cell. He grabbed Steve's chin and forced his head back, meeting the stubborn blue gaze. "HYDRA has been waiting for this moment for a long time."

In the silence that followed, Clint moved, positioning himself in the corner of the room to the left of the door, where he still had a good view of everyone in the room. At the movement, he felt Steve's gaze snap to him but didn't react other than to meet it as Fleischer gave another dark chuckle.

"I hope you aren't surprised, Captain. The loyalty of a man like the Hawk isn't freely given. It is bought. And he knew more than enough about you to interest me." Fleischer explained, before letting go of Steve's chin, only to wrap his hand around his throat, fingers squeezing tight enough to whiten the knuckles. "And finally, HYDRA will have its revenge on the man who only thought he had seen to its downfall."

Clint felt a muscle tick in his jaw as it clenched imperceptivity. The pure malice in Fleischer's voice wasn't unexpected, but it did make him uneasy. That kind of malice, the kind of rage that fueled a seventy-year grudge, wouldn't allow for this to be stretched out. Fleischer may want to watch Steve suffer, but it wouldn't be long before he ended it, just to have the satisfaction of finally seeing Captain America dead. And Clint was going to need all the time he could get.

"I don't doubt that you already know that I wish to see you suffer." Fleischer spoke again after a few moments, taking a small step back from Steve, whose eyes had returned to glare at him. "But there is also a question that I want answered. I want to know how _you_ survived the plane crash at the end of the war, but HYDRA's own leader did not."

Steve didn't make a sound, not offering any sort of answer and simply holding his glare stubbornly.

* * *

It was two days before Fury got back to him.

In those two days, it was all Clint could do to stand in what had become his corner and try to seem unaffected by what Fleischer and his men were doing. They were lucky that Fleischer just wanted him in the room as insurance, not to participate, because if he was sure that if he had to spare even a part of his concentration from keeping himself still and silent, every single person in the compound would be dead and he and Steve would be half way back home. But instead, he had watched. He had stood there without a single attempt at intervention as Steve was beaten, and electrocuted, and beaten again. Fleischer's goons were fond of crowbars.

Steve had never once made a sound, never once looked at him for help or done a single thing to blow his cover. Clint half wished he would, even though he knew that that wouldn't even be a possibility in Steve's mind. In Steve's mind, the mission would be priority first and foremost. And if by some fluke, the Captain _did _blow his cover, then Clint didn't doubt that he would be the one catching heat from the Council.

He was just slipping into the private bunkroom Fleischer had given him when his comm buzzed to life. He instantly allowed his shoulders to slump and his eyes to roll heaven-ward as he tapped a finger to his ear.

_'Hawkeye, there is an incoming transmission for Director Fury. Confirm that you are in a secure position to receive.'_

Clint glanced around himself and gave a snort. He was about as secure as he was going to get. There was a rotating surveillance cycle in the halls and the above-ground compound, but not in the private bunkrooms. The only thing he'd have to worry about was someone walking by the door and hearing him talking to himself.

"Confirmed."

_'Barton,'_ within moments Fury's voice was coming through his ear, and Clint couldn't tell a damn thing from his tone, as usual. _'The Council and I have gone over the situation half a dozen times. The outcomes of each scenario have been weighed, and... The Council has decided that your orders are to remain with the mission objective.'_

Clint was growling quietly before he even realized it, a pit forming in his stomach.

"What?" his tone was low and dangerous, one he could hardly ever remember taking with Fury.

_'What you're getting us is the best intel we've gotten on any HYDRA sect __**since**__ the 40s.' _Fury continued with a heavy sigh that told Clint he wasn't all too happy with what was happening either. _'You are the only operative we've ever gotten this close. If we can use you to piece everything together, we could wipe HYDRA off the map for good. You do realize that that was essentially why this agency was created.'_

"Of course I do." Clint said lowly, entire body stiffening as if there was some invisible threat. "But I fail to see how we can think that this information is worth the life of what is probably the single best asset SHIELD and the Avengers have. We don't exactly have more super soldiers lying around, director."

_ 'In the eyes of the Council, it is.' _Fury said simply, and Clint felt his fist clench and had to use every ounce of will power he had not to slam it into the wall. _'I understand what you're saying Barton. And I'm not saying that I agree with the Council's decision, but I have to enforce it. There's nothing I can do. With matters like these, it's their call. You are expected to follow your orders, and you know the possible consequences for disobeying them better than anyone.'_

Clint could help a scoff, turning on his heel and pacing his bunkroom like a caged tiger. Obviously Fury had to throw that in his face. Almost four years after saving Natasha and bringing in one of the best assets the agency had, he still got shit for it. Of course he knew the consequences. The Council hated him; hated what he was and how good he was at it. They could boot him out of SHIELD for good, they could shove him into one of the high-security prisons for the rest of his life, or he was sure there was some twisting road they could use to put a bullet in his skull. All fun times.

_'You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.' _the director spoke again after a few moments. _'I'm sorry, Barton. I know how much this asks of you, but it is the final decision on the matter.'_

Clint didn't make a sound, eyes closing as he finally stopping pacing and he thumped his head back on the wall. Fury knew him, yes. Fury knew _exactly _what he was asking, and how much it was going to kill him to follow these orders. He'd been in these types of situations before, sacrificing an innocent for the mission as a whole, and while he hated them with every fiber of his being, and did everything in his power to make sure that it was never his only option, he understood _why. _He had the capacity to not only understand how the loss of one life could save hundreds, but to make the decision to follow through, and he had done so on more than one occasion.

But this... this was different, and he knew it. For all his reasoning to Fury about Cap being an asset that they couldn't afford to lose, it was more than that. Because when he was in that room, he wasn't looking at Captain America, the super soldier. He was looking at Steve. He was seeing the kid from Brooklyn who had a wry sense of humor, and a sense of duty that was so unwavering that it was scary. He saw movie night; Steve sprawled out on a couch with a goofy grin as a character made a reference he understood. He saw the playful wrestling matches he and Thor got into that usually ended with something broken and Tony trying to act angry instead of completely amused and failing miserably. He saw Steve, an unwavering brick wall of support that _still _hadn't stopped asking if he wanted to talk every time he ended up going on a morning run. He saw the man that had been the first one that wasn't Natasha to trust him after Loki's mind control.

He saw all those things, not a mission objective, and it had skewed his judgment so completely that he wasn't sure he'd be able to keep the bigger picture in mind. He had allowed himself to get close, like he had known from the beginning that he shouldn't have, and he was paying for it.

By that point he suspected that Fury had ended the transmission, because there wasn't another word said. He lost track of time, sliding down the wall until he was on the floor, letting out a long breath and holding his head in his hands, running through every option he could possibly think of, no matter how ridiculous it sounded, even to him. Eventually, though, he heard a buzzing from his pocket that pulled him out of his thoughts.

Confused, he pulled the small phone he was using for this mission and frowned at it. The only people who had the number to it were SHIELD, in case something happened to his comm, and Fleischer, seeing as that had been the number that Clint had given him in case he needed to contact him. Somewhat cautious, he answered and put the phone to his ear and didn't even have time to say anything before another voice was coming over the line.

_'What's going on?'_

Clint gave a slight sigh as he closed his eyes again. Tony.

"How did you even get this number?" he asked tonelessly, pinching the bridge of his nose and bringing one knee up to his chest.

_'This is me.'_ Tony said as if it explained everything, which it pretty much did. _'More importantly, Fury told us what happened. And that if we touched the situation, we'd wish we'd never been born, or something equally dramatic. That means you're doing something, right? You need any help?'_

Clint's head fell backwards, eyes staying closed as he tried to figure out how in the hell he was supposed to tell Tony that SHIELD had him sitting on his ass. And the billionaire wasn't making it easy, continuing before Clint could form his response.

_'I can be there in a few hours if you need it, or you know Thor.' _Tony pointed out, and Clint steeled his resolve before speaking.

"I don't need any help." he said shortly, and whatever the billionaire was going to say next trailed off instantly. "The Council... my orders are to remain with the mission and not break cover, Tony."

There was silence through the phone, and Clint gave another small sigh, scrubbing a hand down his face. Tony wasn't going to make this easy, and he had a feeling that he wasn't going to accept the fact that you didn't just up and decide to ignore an order from the Council. Sure enough, when Tony's voice did respond, it was low and angry.

_'You're telling me that you have access to him and could get him out, but you aren't going to because someone told you not to.'_

"Tony," Clint started, but the older man just cut him off, voice rising.

_'Now, Barton? You decide __**now**__ that you want to be a good little SHIELD agent and do everything they tell you? When Steve is getting __**tortured**__ by __**HYDRA**__ a few feet away?' _he demanded, and Clint gave a quiet growl, his own tone lowering.

"You think this is easy?" he countered, eyes blazing as he vaulted to his feet and started pacing again. Tony's jab hit closer than he probably realized. He may treat protocol like they were written just for him to break on occasion, but he _never_ just up and disobeyed direct orders for the hell of it, not at this level. In fact, he had only done it _once_. And that had been for Natasha. "You think I like the idea?"

_'So you're just going to let them kill him.'_ Tony said tonelessly, and Clint couldn't help giving a flinch. _'Well that's just great.'_

Not half a second later, the line clicked dead. And Clint stared at the phone for a moment, before clenching his fist around it tightly. He had a choice to make. Tony's reaction made it clear that if he followed his orders and completed his mission, his team mates, aside from Natasha, weren't going to forgive him any more than he would forgive himself. And if he didn't, if he saved Steve like he wanted to, the Council would come down on him like never before and the aftermath wasn't going to be pretty.

He was screwed in either direction. No matter what he did, he was losing something. SHIELD had been everything he'd had for a long time, the only thing that gave him a sense of purpose to stave off the darkness he was capable of. And to turn his back on SHIELD made him feel like he was turning his back on Phil and everything the man had done to save him from himself. But then he had the team, an occasionally completely idiotic group of misfits that had taken him in, accepted everything he was and had been in the past, and given him a family that he'd never had. And if family wasn't worth fighting - worth dying - for, he didn't know what was.

Before he'd even realized he'd made the decision, the phone was back to his ear.

_'What?'_ Tony was obviously still a little angry, but Clint didn't pay that any mind, already working through a strategy in his head.

"How fast can you have a jet in Prague?" he asked, and for a moment Tony didn't respond.

_'Come again?'_

"If I'm disobeying orders, SHIELD isn't exactly going to give me an extraction, are they?" he rolled his eyes, unzipping his duffle in one quick motion and pulling out a map, laying it out on his cot and starting to mark a path from the compound back towards the city. "Local airport is called 'Prague Václav Havel'. I need to know how long it's going to take you to get one of your jets there."

There was the sound of Tony muttering something, probably to JARVIS, before the quiet, distinctive hum of one of Tony's holographic screens.

_'How quick do you need it?'_

"Preferably as quickly as possible." Clint said darkly. "Cap's hurt. And I'm not pulling him out until I know I can do it and not get the both of us recaptured by HYDRA because we're in the damn Czech Republic, and HYDRA has enough man power at this base to hunt us down acre by acre if they need to."

_'Well when you put it that way,' _Tony muttered under his breath. _'Hold on, give me five minutes.'_

Clint kept the phone held to his ear, but turned his attention back to the map in front of him. He knew it was only a matter of time before his comm buzzed in his ear again with Fury in the mood to tear him apart. One of the drawbacks of having a comm that instantly transmitted everything he said.

_'Hey.' _it naturally took Tony less than five minutes to return, but he wasn't about to complain. _'So there's a jet ready and waiting when you are. Airport knows you're coming, security isn't going to be an issue, and no one's going to be asking questions.'_

It was Clint's turn to sit back and pause for a moment, one eyebrow rising before he could help it.

"Do you just keep a spare jet in Prague or something?" he asked, and Tony scoffed.

_'Of course not. But luckily enough I found one for sale.' _the billionaire said dismissively and Clint huffed quietly and shook his head in amazement.

"Of course you did. Alright, I'll call you again once we're in the air." he stopped himself from adding the _'if we get in the air'_. That wasn't going to help things.

_'Good luck.'_ Tony said somewhat awkwardly, which just made Clint grin. _'Be careful alright?'_

That made the archer want to laugh with the absurdity of being careful while he was essentially throwing himself to rabid wolves. Instead however, he just grunted an agreement and ended the call, folding up the map he'd finished with and slipping it into a pocket. He then went about taking everything he needed to keep out of his duffle, knowing there was no way in hell he'd be able to carry it, and probably Steve as well. He made sure all of his weapons were in their proper places, and was just sliding his quiver onto his back when his comm buzzed.

_'Do you have a God-damn death wish?'_

Evidently Fury didn't feel the need to ask if he was in a secure location for the transmission anymore. Clint gave a sigh, pausing in what he was doing to have this conversation.

"All due respect sir, but you can't tell me you expected me to let him die." Clint said matter of factly, tone growing cold and hard. "You're right, I know the consequences for my actions, I accept them, but right now I'd like to concentrate on doing this so I don't get both me and Cap killed before I have a chance to get it rubbed in my face. So back off."

Fury didn't respond to that, and Clint didn't expect him to. Instead, he looked at his watch and started to figure out how he would have to time this to keep himself from being detected on the surveillance feeds. It was the middle of the night, the halls were going to be more or less empty. And he couldn't just torch the place and go, he had to do this as cleanly as possible. Killing a man like Fleischer without orders would get him on a threat list before he could blink. And that was something he actively tried to avoid.

He slipped out of his bunkroom the next time the surveillance flipped from the halls out to the grounds. He had eight minutes to get to Steve's cell, another eight to get him free, and then another eight to get them through the bunkers and outside. Then the tricky part would be hotwiring a jeep from the motor pool and somehow getting through the gate without tripping any alarms or being noticed by anyone. The less bodies he left in his wake the better. But with the whole thing having to take almost exactly twenty-four minutes, it wasn't going to be the easiest thing he'd ever done.

He got to Steve's cell before his eight minutes were up, giving him a few more to be able to spend getting Steve free and making sure he was lucid. But as he stepped into the cell, his eyes narrowed at the sight of two men already in the room, standing over Steve's prone, chained form with their now-customary crowbars in hand. Clint didn't give them a chance to react to or question his presence, freeing a knife from sheaths on either side and throwing them with deadly accuracy into the throat of each man.

He saw Steve's eyes widen slightly as he raised them to look up at the dead bodies that had crumpled to the ground, and then to him.

"Clint?" he asked hoarsely, and Clint frowned with the barely concealed hope in the man's voice, before he moved to crouch in front of him, lock pick already in hand.

"Just take it easy, Cap." he muttered quietly, first deftly working at the lock to the chain around his wrists. "I'm getting you out of here and we're going home, alright?"

"But, the mission," Steve started, and Clint gave a dark huff, eyes narrowing.

"Have you seen yourself? The mission's not my priority right now." he said firmly and Steve blinked at him with dull, glassy eyes but didn't protest again. Once he'd gotten rid of all the chains, he helped Steve off his knees and sat him down so he could lean against the wall, ignoring the winces and sharp intakes of breath he gave at the pain of movement. "Talk to me Steve. What's your condition?"

"Uh," Steve blinked at him again before seeming to force himself to respond. "I had some broke ribs that I think healed wrong. And my head was bleeding. And everything hurts pretty much." he let out a long, slow breath and Clint frowned again, checking his watch before moving away from Steve for a moment to grab his knives, clean them on the dead mens' clothes and slip them back into their sheaths.

He then looked back to Steve and considered him carefully as he slowly moved back to the Captain's side.

"You with me?" he prompted, and Steve let out a breath before looking to him and nodding, some of the dullness fading from his eyes in favor of stubborn determination. "Alright, listen up. Surveillance feeds run on eight minute rotations between the halls of the bunkers and the above-ground portion of the compound. So when we leave this room, we're going to have exactly eight minutes to get to the doors, and we're going to have to time it perfectly. I know you're hurt, but I'm gonna need you to keep up as best you can, okay?"

"Yeah." Steve nodded his understanding, even as he gave a wince with the movement. Clint ignored that for the time being and returned it, before standing and reaching a hand down to help Steve up.

The other man grasped it tightly before pulling himself up with a choked groan on shaking legs, his free hand wrapping around his ribs. Clint caught and steadied him as he started to stumble, throwing Steve's arm over his shoulders and inviting him to lean into his side. Considering the fact that the archer was literally a whole head shorter, it was a bit awkward but it was going to have to be enough.

"Baby steps at first, Steve, we've got a bit of time." Clint coached, urging him past the bodies and towards the door to the room. By his watch, it was thirty seconds before the feeds switched over, and he stopped Steve by the door once they reached it and looked down to wait for the minute to change.

The moment it did, he waited a few seconds just in case before pushing the door open and pulling Steve out with him, starting through the bunkers as silently and quickly as they could manage. Steve's stumbling steps seemed to grow stronger as they went, which Clint counted as a small miracle, along with the fact that so far they hadn't come across anyone.

Of course, no sooner had he had the thought than two voices carried from an adjoining hallway. Clint acted quickly, shoving both himself and Steve around a corner a bit harsher than Steve's abused ribs probably appreciated. Instead of dwelling on that though, he slipped a blade back into his hand and all but held his breath, hearing Steve struggle to do the same beside him. The two men drew closer, but turned in the opposite direction, towards the bunkrooms, and remained completely oblivious.

Pulling Steve forward again as soon as it was safe, Clint continued towards the exit of the bunkers, checking his watch as they went. The hardest part for Steve was the stairs up towards the door, and Clint ended up having to more or less carry him, despite the protest he could feel from his own shoulder and back. He paused at the door, though, waiting once again. He knew if they were going to be spotted, this would be when it happened. When he had to get them through the door somehow at the exact moment the cameras rotated. It felt like he was holding his breath again as he watched the minute change on his watch and simultaneously pushed open the door and pulled Steve through it. The super soldier gave a pained grunt that he tried his best to muffle, and Clint gave a slight wince as his sharp eyes scanned their dimly lit surroundings for anyone that would be a threat.

"Sorry." he muttered, hefting Steve's weight again as he started forward, through the shadows between buildings towards the motor pool and the gate. "Just give me a few more minutes Cap, and we'll be in the clear."

Steve grunted but didn't verbally respond, and Clint really wasn't about to press him at the moment, knowing how lucky he was to have Steve walking under his own power at all. He skirted them around the pools of light provided by the overhead lamps, snaking through rows of cargo trucks and vans to get to the smaller, personal jeeps.

"Here, Steve. In the passenger seat." he grunted, throwing open the door to one of the jeeps and helping the injured man up and into the seat, turning back around once he hissed as he settled gingerly, one hand still wrapped around his ribs. Once he had done so, Clint unholstered a pistol and passed it to him pointedly. "I'm going to cover our exit, see if we can't get out of here without anyone on our tail. Just in case, shoot everyone that's not me, got it?"

Steve managed a smirk and a short nod, which Clint returned before practically melting back into the shadows, pulling his bow free from his quiver as he went.

He stayed clear of where he knew cameras to be positioned, knowing that all it would pick up was a fleeting shadow anyway but not wanting to take the chance. As soon as he found a cargo truck that would give him a clear line of sight to the guard towers, Clint scaled it effortlessly and pulled an arrow from his quiver, notching it into his bow. Eyeing his targets, he decided to take out the two on the ground before the one in either tower.

He pulled the arrow back to anchor at the corner of his mouth, pausing for a moment before releasing it. He didn't wait the fraction of a second to make sure it hit before pulling and firing a second arrow effortlessly, dropping the second ground guard before he could react to his dead comrade. The man in each tower went next, with no more than a dull, muted thud of impact coming from either of them.

Scanning quickly for any other guards he would need to take out and finding none, he slid down off the cargo truck and started back towards the jeep where he had left Steve, folding his bow back up and sliding it into his quiver. He was careful as he approached the jeep, knowing that Steve was bound to be a little jumpy. Sure enough as he approached the jeep, making sure it was from the front, the pistol he had given the Captain was brought up and aimed towards him with only the slightest hint of a waver.

"It's only me." he assured quickly, and Steve blinked at him, before lowering the pistol with a huff, and placing it carefully in the center console of the jeep. Clint approached quickly and swung himself into the driver's seat, and within moments he had the jeep started and moving.

As he stopped the jeep at the gate and got out to open it, he saw brighter lights flickering on from the sides of the buildings, and shouted orders to stop and identify himself. So they must not have realized Steve was missing yet. He jumped back into the jeep just as bullets started flying and he ducked and shoved down the gas pedal, shooting forward down the dark, singular road that led away from the compound.

He didn't allow himself to focus on the sounds of pursuit, knowing it would take them a few minutes at least to get together a sizable force to send out after them, and by then he would have had enough time to lose them down one of the three roads that branched off this one, all leading back to the city in their own round-about ways. That's where the map he'd prepared ahead of time came in.

"That was... easier than I remember it." Steve said eyes on the mirror that pointed back behind them. Clint just snorted.

"Yeah, well, that's what I get for making a point to study their surveillance for the last two weeks." the archer dead panned, and Steve gave a shrug, only to give a pained hiss with the action not a fraction of a second later. "Take it easy, alright?"

"Yeah," Steve breathed, closing his eyes tightly for a few moments, before he continued to speak. "SHIELD giving us an extraction?"

"Not exactly." Clint said, tone darkening and not saying another word as they shot down the old, darkened road towards where the glow of the city shone above the trees.

As Tony had said, when he pulled up to the airport, there was a man waiting for them that looked slightly alarmed by Steve's condition and his weapons, but to his credit he didn't question, leading them past any security or customs and directly to a small private jet that was already waiting on a runway. By the time they got onto the jet, Steve was more or less unconscious, and Clint wasn't about to make him be any more alert than he had to be. It was an almost eight hour flight back to New York, and while he didn't think they'd have to deal with any medical emergencies thanks to Steve's rapid healing, he knew the man was still in a hell of a lot of pain. He didn't allow himself to relax until they were taxiing down the runway, head falling back into his seat and his eyes closing as he marveled at the fact that he had actually just pulled that off.

Once the plane was in the air, Clint pulled his phone out and held it to his ear, keeping his eyes closed as he waited for Tony to pick up.

_'Clint?'_ Tony sounded hopeful, and the archer gave a humorless snort as he responded.

"We aren't dead." he said tonelessly. "We just got into the air. Steve's tore up, though, and he's going to need a doctor when we land."

_'Okay. I'll make sure we've got someone here to help him.' _Tony assured, before he paused and asked a question, sounding not quite comfortable. _'You heard from SHIELD?'_

"Fury'll probably be there when we land." Clint said, not a shred of doubt in his voice as he allowed his eyes to open and shift over to where Steve had slumped into the seat he had been deposited into, now either completely unconscious or asleep. He knew Fury would be there, and by this point the Council will have probably ordered for him to be arrested and brought in.

Even with that in mind, he still couldn't bring himself to regret it.

* * *

**Okay, so maybe there's a small bit of regret on my part. I still hope you enjoyed it (even better if you enjoyed it enough to leave a review *hint*), but otherwise, I will see you all again for chapter 7.  
~Dogstar**


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